sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy

Pull the Units Down

2011-11-02T12:52:00.007Z

Despite earlier gripes I'm going to be giving several talks about Uncommon over the next month or so; one at the Architectural Association in London (of all places) on 10th November; one in Oxford as part of their Zero Books Season on 15th November; and another in Zagreb at the Centre for Drama Art on 17th November (no link as yet). There's also a campaign to make 'Cunts are Still Running the World' Xmas number 1. As you can see above it is a cause richly worth supporting.

Talks on other matters, connected to another thing, more of which will be revealed presently: I'll be expounding on post-Soviet squares in Cambridge on 8th November; on the paradoxes of modernism and conservation at the ASCHB on 9th November; on the 'socialist skyscraper' at the Historical Materialism conference on the 11th; and at Pushkin House in London I'll be taking part in a season on Constructivism, laterally connected with the current RA exhibition: one solo talk on Communist Constructivism on 23rd November, and taking part in a debate on the built legacy of the Soviet avant-garde on the 30th.

Some writings: Urban Trawl in Aberdeen; below, in case missed, long ramble about industry; linked to that, long and equally rambling post on the Lloyds Building for The 80s Blog. I've also written a short text for photographer Robin Maddock's book lovingly depicting that most jolie-laide of British cities, Plymouth, God Forgotten Face.

Go and read these instead: the now-regularly blog-updating Agata Pyzik causing a scrap on matters Ostalgic with this superb Frieze piece; the excellent English-language Polish politics/economy blog Beyond the Transition; Jones the Planner on an English city which oddly hasn't completely screwed itself up; Douglas Murphy on Summerland; and the 70s, 80s and 90s blogs are still generating the best online writing around.

Garden Festival as Crystal Palace

2011-11-02T12:30:00.006Z

Below is the full version of a piece published on Comment is Free a few weeks ago about a book I found in a bookshop in Lee, and thought 'aha! This is the source of the famous Wienerisation! (which any reader of Robin Carmody will be familiar with). It's about a third or so longer and somewhat less zippy.

There's one thing which the leaders of both of the main parties seem to agree. It is expressed in different ways, and with different degrees of sincerity. For Ed Miliband, it's a question of rewarding the 'producers' in industry rather than the 'predators' of finance capitalism; for George Osborne, 'we need to start making things again'. Yet there's no doubt that both the Conservative Party (from 1979 to 1997) and the Labour Party (from 1997 to 2010) presided over a massive decline in industry and 'production'; both of them favoured finance and services over industry and technology. Yet here is an apparent change of heart. What does it mean, this apparent divide between producer and predator, industrialist and speculator, this apparent desire to turn the long-defunct workshop of the world back into a workshop of some sort?

Answers might lie in a book published thirty years ago, one which was once a fixture of British political debate – the historian Martin J Wiener's 1981 polemic English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Keith Joseph handed a copy to every member of Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. But compare it with the rest of his notorious 'reading list' to the Tory cabinet of the early '80s. Most of that list consisted of the classics of neoliberalism – defences of raw, naked capitalism from the likes of Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman, the books which are often associated with an economic policy that decimated British industry. Wiener's book was different. Not an economic tract as such, it was more of a cultural history, and its apparent influences were largely from the left. A short analysis of English political and literary culture, the centrality it gave to literature evoked Raymond Williams; its insistence on the sheer scale of English industrial primacy showed a close reading of Eric Hobsbawm; and by ascribing industrial decline to England's lack of a full bourgeois revolution, it had much in common with Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson's famous 1960s 'thesis' on English backwardness. In fact, Wiener seldom cited right-wing sources at all.

Wiener claimed that British industrial capitalism reached its zenith in 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace, its protomodernist architecture filled with displays exhibiting British industrial prowess. After that, it came under attack from both left and right – in fact, Weiner argues that the left and right positions were essentially indistinguishable. Whether ostensibly conservative, like the Gothic architect Augustus Welsby Pugin, or Marxist, like William Morris, opinion formers in the second half of the nineteenth century agreed that industry had deformed the United Kingdom, that its cities and its architecture were horrifying, that its factories were infernal, and that it should be replaced with a return to older, preferably medieval certainties. Wiener claims the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as one of this movement's successes – an unprecedented group that, in his account, fundamentally believed that its own era uniquely had no valuable architectural or aesthetic contribution to make.

This horrified reaction to industry, and most of all to the industrial city, affected middle class taste (and Wiener has it that working class taste invariably followed suit) – the ideal was now the country cottage, and if it couldn't be in the country itself, then the rural could be simulated on the city's outskirts, as in the garden suburbs of Bedford Park or Hampstead, followed by the 'by-pass Tudor' of the early 20th century. The real England, insisted commentators of left, right and centre, was the country, despite the fact that since the middle of the 19th century, for the first time anywhere, a majority lived in cities. One of Weiner's sharpest anecdotes concerns a book of poetry about 'England' distributed to soldiers during the First World War. Not one poem even mentioned the industrial cities where those who fought had overwhelmingly come from. By the '20s, competing political leaders posed as country gents, whether the Tory Stanley Baldwin, marketed rather incredibly as a well-to-do farmer, or Labour's Ramsay MacDonald, who presented himself as a simple man of the dales.

This sounds far from a Tory argument. Britain's industrial and urban reality was ignored or lambasted in favour of an imaginary, depopulated countryside, and its industrial might and technological innovation suffered accordingly – what could the Conservative Party possibly find to its taste in this? That becomes clear in the third of Wiener's points. British capitalism, he argues, had become fatally ashamed of capitalism itself. It was embarrassed by the muck, mess and noise of industry, negligent of the great northern cities where that was largely based, and embarrassed at being seen to be 'money-grubbing'. Wiener, like many a leftwinger, argued that this came from the English middle class' love affair with its betters, the usually fulfilled desire of every factory owner to become a country gent, a rentier rather than producer. But he also suggested it came from a misplaced philanthropy, and a pussyfooting discomfort with making a profit from making stuff. In the form of the City of London's finance capitalism it had even found a way to make money out of money itself.

Now the book starts to sound like the Tory Party we know today. British capitalism, it argues, needs to rediscover the free market, the profit motive and the 'gospel of getting-on' that it had once disdained. Wiener's adversaries here become now-familiar Thatcherite punchbags – the BBC, for instance, an institution of paternalist arrogance which haughtily refused to give the public the money-generating entertainment it really wanted; or the Universities, devoted to the lefty talking shop of the 'social sciences' rather than robustly useful applied science. Enter David Willetts. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit divided the Tory Party between those who welcomed this new swaggering capitalism – heirs to 19th century Manchester Liberalism – and those who really were Conservatives, who were horrified by this scorn for the country, old England, conservation and preservation. The Tory Party still tries to balance these two impulses, rather ineptly - Grant Shapps praises garden cities and Philip Hammond raises the speed limit, Cameron advocates concreting over the green belt and Gove slates modernist architecture.

Yet there's a reason why nobody reads this book anymore - because Wiener's central thesis was so resoundingly disproved. He predicts that in bringing back 'market discipline', Thatcher will rejuvenate British industry and the 'northern' values it inculcated – instead, the industrial centres of Tyneside, Clydeside and Teeside, South Wales and the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and the West Riding all faced a cataclysm on such a scale that most have still not recovered. Wiener might have praised cities and industry, but the former usually voted Labour, and the latter entailed strong trade unions. Neither point was to endear them to the new, swaggering capitalism. The cities were even further emasculated; their organs of local government defeated and destroyed, their base of coal, steel, shipbuilding and textiles downsized or simply wiped off the map. How did this happen? Perhaps because of that politer way of making money – the City. Wiener scornfully quotes one Rolls-Royce executive in the 1970s who tells him that he is in the motor industry for pleasure, not for profit; if he just wanted to make money, he says, he'd be in the City. And from Spinningfields in Manchester to Canary Wharf in London, former industrial sites now house the trading floors of banks that had to be bailed out like the lame duck industries of the '70s. And where industry really did transform rather than disappear, it took on new, hidden forms – the exurban business park or the container port, all safely away near the green belt, enabling the fantasy of old England to continue unobstructed.

The book faced a common fate for those who try to separate out finance and industrial capitalism, as if they could be prised apart. Britain is more obsessed than ever with an imaginary rural arcadia which bears less and less resemblance to the places where we actually live, but the profit motive has been strengthened in the process, not limited. It seems amazing at this distance to imagine anyone could have thought otherwise – a counterfactual Thatcherism which revived industrial Britain, with Heseltine's Garden Festivals as the new Crystal Palaces. But what is especially bizarre about the current orthodoxy – from which none of the main parties are exempt – is that Wiener's attack on all but 'useful' moneymaking activities is continued, without the concrete industrial products or technological advances that there was once to show for it. There is a counter-theory, which has it that neither speculators nor small businesses are the real 'wealth creators', but rather the masses who have nothing to sell but their labour. Their voice wasn't heard in Wiener's book, and it isn't heard in the current political debate.

Entertainment can sometimes be hard

2011-09-13T00:22:00.006+01:00

I'll also be belatedly launching Uncommon at Bookmarks on Tuesday the 27th September, at 6.30pm. The second actual print review of my largely unnoticed diamat book on Pulp is now in the Wire, and very sweet it is. If you would like to review it my email address is adjacent, but here are some online reviews that were very welcome - the wonderfully named Musical Urbanism, a great Hegel-quoting one at Red Mist Reviews, also ...i can stay and Adelle Stripe's Dark Satanic Mills, who also draws welcome attention to Lisa Cradduck's etchings that so enliven the book; Lisa is also offering signed editions of them via Adelle.

Here are some of the usual bits and bobs - not much in the way of new writing due to moving house and finishing my PhD (but viva still pending). More at Urban Trawl; a review of a compendious book on Communist Fashion in the current Radical Philosophy; a review of two oddly prescient books on the estates of Hackney, for Icon; see also this. There's also some contributions to anthologies or other people's books which I keep meaning to plug on here: I have a 'modest proposal' for Sheffield in Julie Westerman's lovely Brutalist Speculations and Flights of Fancy; a long essay on Brutalism and Heritage for Regenerating Culture and Society; an essay on the early, good stuff in BDP's self-immortalising Continuous Collective; an interview with the artist on post-Soviet metropolis and wilderness in Ruth Maclennan's monograph Anarcadia; and an expanded version of the Soviet chapter from Militant Modernism (with added material based on, like, actually visiting Russia) is in the excellent Star City - The Future Under Communism. But more, much more than this, I've blurbed Andrew Jordan's very fine HMP Haslar socio-fantasy Bonehead's Utopia, which is essential reading.

Coming Home to Roost

2011-08-14T18:06:00.003+01:00

Wrote this, from my current Safe European Home. Also, read these, this and this.

Signs of Life

2011-07-13T14:02:00.004+01:00

There is below this now-customary round-up an actual blog post, unregurgitated, for the first time in a long time. It's on the hot topic of Simon Jenkins' favourite piece of Polish urbanism and why it is a great deal more complex and interesting than that might imply (or than he probably knows). I'm aware there's not much point in writing about anything now other than how they're all in it together, but here's a few things for light relief. A BD building study on the Unison building in Euston Rd is now up on the Urban Trawl blog; there's a review of Iain Sinclair's Ghost Milk for the Independent; I can be found procrastinating about Renzo Piano's Shard in Artforum; and the Red Pepper piece on why big modernist council estates are in fact a good thing is now online. There's also a nice review of Uncommon in the Morning Star, perhaps fittingly the only review as yet in print. Finally there are lots of new things on Flickr, largely as a means of stopping my hard drive from dying horribly.

Some interesting other things worth drawing your attention to: Meet the Leeds Libraries, a set of public facilities left in disrepair in that Capital of the North; Sunlit Uplands, a set of haunting photographs of Midlands suburbia; a machine that makes the motor vehicle look sensible; a co-operative village skyscraper in China; and an excellent website previously unknown to me on the gentrification of Southwark. And Jones the Planner makes it to insurgent Southampton, site of course of one of the greatest town planning fuck-ups of the last thirty years. And there's stiff competition.

Reconstruction Time Again

2011-07-12T17:45:00.012+01:00

I have spent a third to a half of the last year living in Warsaw at Dom Pyzik, and somehow have ended up not really writing about it (well, with let's say a few exceptions). Partly this is because I'm working on Something that will have lots and lots about it, partly it is because of having too many other things to do, but for whatever reason this is something that should be addressed. So this post will go to at least try and make up for this rather amiss situation. There's much, much there to write about, although almost all of it that I have planned will be saved for the Something mentioned above, here's a taster; and something to make clear that this blog hasn't completely become a glorified CV.

The thing about Warsaw that everyone knows (other than Joy Division or Bowie references) is that 85% of it was destroyed in 1944, and that it was then reconstructed to the letter after 1945. Strangely, this coexists with another idea of Warsaw as a centre of wide streets, towers and general Warsaw Pact monolithism. Accordingly, for a certain type of architectural critic or historian, Warsaw is irresistible. It is, for traditionalists, the road not travelled - a city where, instead of modernism, we got a dignified reconstruction of the old world. In fact, neither of the statements is exactly true. Recent research makes clear that the 85% figure includes much that was more damaged than irretrievably destroyed, and it's also clear that the reconstructed city took frequently huge liberties with the historical fabric - how could they not? And after some acquaintance with it - ie, through coming here to eat at Pod Samsonem - it's also clear that the modernist objection to the place - as a Disneyfied simulacrum of interest only to tourists - isn't quite right either.

The Old Town is a place of paradox - a project of the Communist Party, it is loved by nationalists; the only 'authentically Polish' part of Warsaw, it is anything but authentic. Here, you can see every one of the four orders of simulation described by Jean Baudrillard in 1981, occurring in Stalinist Poland between 1946 and 1976. It is the sheer inauthenticity, and the only Soviet trimmings that are visible only slightly below the surface, which stop it from being merely cute. Although cute it undoubtedly is. Well, mostly.

The best way to reach the Old Town, or rather the Stare Miasto and Nove Miasto (both are quite impercetibly linked) is via the Trasa W-Z, a West-East promenade that was very much part of the project, and was later lined with tower blocks. Its sandwiching function gives its name to a still-produced local cake. Even before the edges of it started being filled with high-rises, it was a project far from the usual notion of historically scrupulous reconstruction, using as much as possible of the original fabric and street plan. Instead, in order to make the whole apparation of the destroyed city's re-emergence into something functionally viable, a road was cut under and across it. The city's 1950s Stalinist Victory monument was moved here (rather than being demolished) at some point in the 1990s, to the point where she now seems to guard the reconstruction.

Then you get to a glowing, tile-lined underpass, as modern as can be inside but clad in heavy, psuedohistorical masonry, an example of what Vladimir Paperny describes as the heavy, earthbound nature of Stalinist 'Culture Two', where speed itself must of necessity be weighed down. There is, however, a pedestrian route to enter the Old Town from ground level as well, and it is equally unexpected:

It is an underpass with a connecting escalator, and it's a piece of the Moscow Metro in Warsaw. Literally so - the project was designed and built by employees of Moskva Metrostroi. The lamps are Soviet in derivation, showing that peculiar heaven-in-the-bowels-of-the-earth style that was fundamental to Soviet underground systems. the statues, too, are of, first, the People's Army, and second, the builders, who are always also the Builders Of Communism. Both of the sets of statues are under glass panels, very probably to stop them from being vandalised - this protection is also very unexpected in a country which prides itself on anticommunism. So you emerge, in theory, from 1950s Moscow into 17th century Warsaw:

This is the vestibule for the 'Metro'. There was, in fact, a Moscow Metro-style Metro being planned and in some cases even dug around the same time. It was cancelled when the relatively reformist Gomulka regime took power as an expensive vanity project. Gomulka wasn't particularly keen on historical reconstructions either, and said that the Royal Castle would be rebuilt over his dead body. It was, a couple of years after he died - it's the building with the lovely (pre-patinated?) Slavic copper spire in the photograph above. It was built in 1976, although unlike many of the other reconstructed buildings, it doesn't declare the year of (re)construction on it, as if confidence in the illusion had lessened somewhat. From there, you come to the tourist bit:

When the reconstructed Warsaw is praised, it's usually this which is meant - a giant great cobbled square, surrounded by a jagged skyline of sweetly marzipanlike Mitteleuropean buildings, with a market inside. When it is written about, especially by a certain veteran British political commentator/architectural writer, it is usually presented as the Polish capital's agora, its real city centre. Yet it has no tube station, no real facilities other than often very expensive restaurants and stalls with nick-nacks, and hence is surely the Disney city centre that it is often accused of being. The centre of Warsaw, at least in my experience, is defined by the modernist geometry of the Eastern Wall, Stalin's 'gift' of the Palace of Culture and the futurist Central Station - all nearly a mile away. This place is an adjunct, an oddity, divorced from the city's everyday life. Or at least this is what it seems to be, but complexities multiply when you get away from the square.

The Old Town is only one part of reconstructed Warsaw. There are a great many reconstructed 18th century classical buildings, and they are usually a lot less interesting, because this is high architecture, with blueprints, named architects, details that must be reproduced in order for the buildings to really exist as reconstructions. These belong to Baudrillard's first order of simulacra - just the remaking of something that already exists, as faithfully as the technology allows. These are usually just outside the Old Town, leading towards Nowy Swiat and to the city's real 1950s centre. So they're also often interspersed with the modernism of the Gomulka era. But there's another modernism of a sort etched onto the buildings themselves:

What makes the bulk of the old town buildings so interesting is that there isn't really an original, or at least not in the sense of something unchangeable - these were buildings that had been constantly added to and remade over the centuries, so the 1950s could so much the same. These are the second order of Stare Miasto Simulacra. The buildings are vividly coloured to the point where they don't look remotely old, and the sgraffito work, applied in the 1950s, is reminiscent of the animation of the era, the cut-out and montage films by the likes of Jan Lenica. Their cute, angular forms are hardly comparable with the heroic workers of socialist realism, but nor are they abstract. The one below is on the Old Town's only modernist building (ie flat-roofed and without historicist dressing), and it's notable that you barely notice the difference:

These drawings, etchings, paintings and mosaics are deliberately childlike things, cute pieces of 1950s design which have somehow ended up part of a project to evoke the 15th century. To think that they are separate from the ideology is a mistake, however. Look at the two images at the top of this post - one of them of the medieval city undergoing reconstruction, and the other of the Stakhanovite bricklayers who were doing all that work, and at record speeds - and note also that they're in the same cartoonish style as the Little Mermaids above (note also that the second of the two has not been restored - it's best we forget about the 20th century workers who built it). Sometimes they are figurative, neo-renaissance statuary, based on something historically significant that was there before:

and elsewhere, they're straightforward abstraction, of various kinds, either slightly disturbing dismembered bodies, with later and unsubtle additions.

Some of the sgraffito work is also sortof figurative, Disney stuff on some level, the sort of thing that might have been done in medieval Warsaw should they have wanted to do so even if they didn't:

and then there's a move into lush, shimmering, chromatic abstraction.

Step into any of these blocks and you find that they are actually part of another order of simulacra altogether. The majority of these pretty pseudohistorical facades are the masks for public housing, and that's coincidentally the reason why the place lacks the feeling of being a City Centre - because what it really is, is a council estate with sgraffito and restaurants. At times, this is really very vivid - as with the long deck-access block that marks the Old Town's southern corner. Take away the detail, and this is straight-up modernist municipal housing.

That this is a tourist destination, however, can be easily ascertained - the difference is that everyone is home in bed by a sensible time.

But if there's any doubt, just read the other etchings on the walls.

The fourth order of simulacra in the Warsaw Old Town is Mariensztat, a place which really didn't exist before, but which is aesthetically completely of a piece with the earlier orders of simulacra that make up most of it. It's a historical area, but it was completely replanned on a new pattern by the Communist authorities, and became their first showpiece housing estate.

The approach is exactly the same; the painting, now worn enough to almost look convincingly historic; the winding streets; the cobbles; and the sgraffito, which here too is surely the cutest thing ever implemented by the Six Year Plan of an iron-fisted Stalinist regime:

Mariensztat opens out to a large public square, with another very pretty bit of trimming (this time, a mosaic clock) at the corner. If being unkind, one could point out that this is not a style massively unlike that of Nazi architecture at its more vernacular and volkisch (rather than mock-Hellenic) end - Paul Schultze-Naumburg wouldn't have felt completely out of place here. What makes it most unlike the Nazi aesthetic is that strange, out-of-place cutesiness. Not the cutesiness of the carefully worn, and higgledy-piggledy, but of the very 1950s, wholly of-their-time clocks, paintings and drawings. The inspiration seems to come a little from Warsaw's one-time Prussian Gauleiter ETA Hoffmann, a child-like fairy tale uncanniness which is surely the most unlikely response to mass murder in the corpus of public art and city planning. Warsaw had, and still builds, gigantic monuments to its heroism, self-sacrifice and fortitude, but here everything is Lilluputian and pretty. The impulse seems to be comparable to that of post-war modernism, that was remaking the rest of the city by the time the reconstruction was finished - the urge to shake off all of that horrible weight and instead create something light, joyous and dreamlike.

The satellite dishes that line the houses, though, imply that those within the Old Town simulacra have other fantasies and simulations to think about.

Broken Biscuits

2011-06-23T17:08:00.004+01:00

Uncommon - an essay on Pulp, is out tomorrow, on Zero Books - it's the pink one at the end just above. This article has a lot of the themes from it summarised, and an extract from the book, on the subject of 'Mis-Shapes', up at Up Close And Personal. and Richard King's Domino Radio show has me rambling about Pulp and playing their particularly outre numbers, followed by Dan Hancox saying much more important things about grime and student protest and then returning to filth via 'Ramping Shop'. The first review of it is, as ever, in 3:AM.

Mercifully not on the subject of Pulp, on the subject of Southampton council workers' co-ordinated strike - a (rare) pleasure to feel proud of the city.

(Bad New) Things

2011-06-02T21:42:00.015+01:00

Or, rather, a post a bit like what you might get at Things, only somewhat less generous. It may or may not have escaped attention (though it has not escaped the attention of the Oxonian Review) that Zero Books is having an extraordinarily good run at the moment - so here's plugs for four I think especially worth plugging. Three books on film, in the loosest sense, which confront - just in case anyone was about to bandy about a word nearly rhyming with neuralgia - some current products of the culture industry at its most base and ruthless. Masha Tupitsyn's oddly dreamlike immortalisation of her twitter feed Laconia has been very well discussed by Giovanni Tiso here; two books which seem more precisely linked are Evan Calder Williams' Combined and Uneven Apocalypse and Steven Shaviro's Post-Cinematic Affect. Despite the cold precision of the latter and the dialectical poetics of the former, both seem to subscribe, while disassociating themselves from it as a political 'strategy', to a kind of accelerationism of aesthetics - a plunging into the sheer wrongness of the contemporary moment as a means of inhabiting and understanding it, deranging the senses so as to be more clear. Both are excellent, gripping books. (a post in the unwritten pile at present is an attempt to use Shaviro's analysis to talk about Night Watch and Day Watch; another time). More domestic, albeit deceptively so: Rosa Ainley's irascible, brief-yet-capacious 2 Ennerdale Drive, an 'unauthorised biography' of a suburban house in Colindale. Into this frame she crams a trenchant analysis of suburbia itself, both against those who would condemn it and against those who would celebrate it, an Angela Carter-esque saga of acting dynasties, and a smartly Benjaminian take on the ubiquitous family history genre. I took a picture of the house in question in Colindale for the cover, but it wasn't used in the end. So here's the road sign instead.

Given that I'll be disappearing down a thesis-shaped hole again quite soon, here's a round-up of recent things, mostly by me but thankfully not exclusively. An interview, in Russian, on the subject of Soviet and post-Soviet architecture, at OpenSpace.Ru. The interview itself was in English, as I am useless, and then translated, by the esteemed Oleksiy Radynski, editor of the Ukrainian section of the frankly impressive Polish broad left journal/publishing house/discussion group/etc Krytyka Polityczna (who now also have an English branch). I'll put the full English version up here soon, partly as a placeholder for some unwritten posts on Warsaw, Łódź, Kiev and Moscow - I've been amassing lots of pictures and notes on the former in particular which I've just not had the time to do anything coherent with, as yet. A far more informed take on the fascinating and horrible aesthetics of contemporary Russia than anything I can do is an excellent OpenSpace post on the neo-fascist/new urbanist/new rich/neo-Stalinist/neo-colonial porn that is being used to advertise the Sochi Olympics, translated into English by Thomas of Chto Delat.

Extracts from Uncommon will be online soonish, but here's a small Flickr album of photographs taken from the propagandist literature of post-war Sheffield that I was going to use in the book but didn't, because they had a moire pattern on them. This might be a blessing in disguise, as it means the book isn't quite so much a product of a currently perhaps somewhat worn aesthetic, naming no names etc. More interestingly, here's Pyzik's take on it for the 90s' blog, via her blog and Lampa - aside from making it clear that she actually *enjoys* Freaks, which puts me to shame, the post has many intriguing things to say about the way that Pulp did and did not translate into the Polish context. On which note, in case you missed it, here's her Guardian piece on Polish art as alternately sold abroad and as an attempt to create new spaces at home.

I have a (not online) piece in the current Red Pepper on why the left should be advocating municipal modernist council estates rather than certain, somewhat over-romanticised 'bottom-up' forms of urbanism (which also entailed an audio interview with me along with Anna Minton and others, here). Something similarly offline but older that I've forgotten to link to: a piece on walkways for Landscape Journal, not online. Online is a short piece on the Pepys Estate in Deptford for The London Column, a topic better dealt with by Harry, from DAGE in his Resonance FM communiques. Some more southern Urban Trawls. On Brighton; with Croydon next, then Plymouth, then the Valleys, then back northwards to Edinburgh, Aberdeen and finally Belfast. Suggestions as ever are very gratefully received. You should also read immediately Douglas Murphy on Kate Macintosh's masterful Dawson Heights.

Three recent things in the Guardian - a double-review of Lars T Lih's brilliant new Lenin and Eagleton's workmanlike Marx, a piece on the BFI's new Kino early Soviet film season (on which note, those even remotely interested should rush without the slightest hesitation to see Pudovkin's virtually never-seen proto-Neubauten Germanic metal-bashing masterpiece Deserter); a short comment piece on the apparent demise of the property-owning democracy. Which led to this, which I don't really know what to say about.

Finally, Southampton!

Socialists! Where Is Your Vortex?

2011-06-02T21:42:00.006+01:00

Among recent things which I have forgotten to plug is a piece for volume One of the new Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies*. It's an expansion and development of previous things on Vorticism, or more specifically the question of why and how Vorticism didn't become a British analogue to the continental avant-garde, despite distinctly looking like one in 1914. It contains, however, an opening attempt at counterfactual fiction, part of which I'm posting below, because a) there's a Vorticism show at the Tate and everything and b) as a way of making clear why I don't write fiction. Enjoy, or not, as the case may be).

1929, London, capital of the Union of British Socialist Republics. A decade after the end of a short and brutal Civil War, and 14 years after the British Expeditionary Force was driven out of Europe by General Ludendorff's victorious offensive. The capital of a devastated country, denuded of its Empire but now tentatively regaining some of its former prominence as the most industrially powerful of the Socialist Republics that now make up half of Europe - though trade between them is difficult, with the Baltic Sea cut off by the vast German Empire, its trade embargo assisted by the anticommunist United States. At the turn of the 1930s, the UBSR is starting to construct new cities.

This is not happening without controversy. Through much of the country, pastoral garden cities are rising from the ruins, the towns destroyed first by Zeppelin raids and then by the Black & Tans. New towns like Connolly outside Dublin, Maxtonburgh in Strathclyde or Morristown in Hertfordshire have been planned by Raymond Unwin using local materials, craftsmanship and winding streets, to the splenetic derision of the Vorticist International. Based in London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Leeds, but with corresponding branches in Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and Leningrad, this group has the ear of the more enlightened commissars of the UBSR's four constituent republics. Edward Wadsworth and Frederick Etchells' redesign of West Yorkshire into a model Vorticist Metropolis is proceeding apace, with their intricate, jagged structures of concrete and glass sprouting walkways and towers that criss-cross the factory chimneys of Halifax and Huddersfield. Wyndham Lewis, the group's chair, is finally completing his government commission to transform Regent Street, which was halfway through Reginald Blomfield's neo-baroque redesign when interrupted by of the 1919 Whitechapel Insurrection. Monumental sculptures by Jacob Epstein adorn the House of Soviets on the site of the demolished Houses of Parliament, though the 'compromised' classical-Vorticist design by Charles Holden was subjected to much Vorticist scorn on publication.

Opponents of the Vorticists are keen to remind them of their roots in a pre-revolutionary art movement. Commissar Harry Pollitt told the Daily Worker that 'not so long ago these were bohemians who sneered at the proletariat, who hoped to 'kill John Bull with art' when John Bull was trying to kill the British bourgeoisie'. Some mutter darkly about counter-revolutionary activity during the Civil War on the part of some in the group, with Edward Wadsworth under particular suspicion. But although their eager participation in the reconstruction has allayed the suspicions of many in the Trade Unions and the Workers' Councils, perhaps their antisocial reputation isn't completely undeserved. Interviewed on his work at Regent Street, Lewis, dressed in a far from proletarian dinner jacket offset by a hammer and sickle pin, told the Daily Herald ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would gain by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks.’

* (which can be obtained from here, and features several far less silly and more intelligent papers)

It may look to the untrained eye

2011-05-17T21:57:00.004+01:00

Another apologies and links post. Normal service will not be resumed for some time - aside from doing lots of paid work, the need to actually finish my sodding thesis has sharply intervened. Anyone who wants some idea of what that is about should obtain a copy of the current (ie, number 62, colour pink) AA Files, which has an extended essay on the Gosprom building in Kharkov, taking in Eisenstein, mammoths, Felix Dzherzhinsky, Robert Byron and other such delights. Most of it is in the thesis, or at least the current draft of it. Some killing-2-birds-with-one-stone: I also give a short precis of what the building is and why it's important as the 20th Century Society Building of the Month.

Some other similarly short things: in Socialist Review on Arts Council cuts and collectivity; a rewrite of previous notes on Dublin for Ireland's CrisisJam; something on Matthew Darbyshire for the catalogue of this exhibition; a paragraph on BDP's website, of all things, on their best building (there's more on this to come, incidentally), and a couple of Trawls I don't think I've linked to here yet. I've also, in order to stop my computer from dying, uploaded lots of things onto Flickr. Some rather better pictures accompany some short New Ruins extracts at the new The London Column, for whom I did something else that I'll flag when it's up...

Further details about the Pulp book were promised. It will be out in the last week of June, just after the reformation entirely non-accidentally; it's not in any way a biography of Pulp, but an extended essay on class, mainly, through Pulp records. Given that it was his 1989 that I had in my head as a model when writing it, I cajoled Joshua Clover into blurbing it. It's nowhere near as good, but thankfully he does not say so. It is as follows:

This book is a small marvel. Even within the most ambiguous cultural flowering, something transcendent is cached. Owen Hatherley knows this. Possessed of an architect's clarity and a modernist's astringent vision, he draws forth the the paradoxical and brilliant core of Britpop, and restores Pulp's contradictory genius to its proper place in history. Behind the Blairite swagger of Cool Britannia and the spackle of commercial spectacle, Hatherley finds the truth of pop culture and social antagonism, entangled with the glory and oddity of Pulp's musical career and evanescent fame. Elegant about the songs, lucid about the band's warped trajectory, and incisive about the politics of daily life coiled within the sound and lyrics and moment, Hatherley chronicles the adventures of the Sheffield gang and their "class war casanova" who came forth as the truth of a deeply false moment, bad faith you could dance to, a dialectical verdict on a singular passage in time.

It can be purchased here, already, on discount and everything. Am planning to put a little bit online soon enough. Other than that, the pile of unwritten posts currently consists entirely of several city essays which I will probably write all in one binge in the summer, as well as a more general thing on the delights of chronic autoimmune disease called Flanerie with Crohn's, or something. In the meantime, those looking for bloggery that isn't on indefinite hiatus would be well advised to go here, here, here and here.

Some things

2011-04-02T01:06:00.006+01:00

More on the Urban Trawl blog: several things which have previously been on here, mostly on Thames Estuary nonplaces, but with one new thing on the Metropolitan County of the West Midlands. More to come soon, hopefully.

Also - with a nod to the Portakabin-sponsored Kosmograd - a piece in Frieze, thinking aloud about prefab, and a Guardian column about the exemplary bit of Non-Plan that is 'London Luton'.

Links and more details for the talks/walks mentioned below: in Sheffield next week (here and here) and a bit later, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff. No link as yet for the Glasgow talk, but it will be at the Glasgow Film Theatre on May 5 at 11.30am, as part of a 'study day' entitled 'What Good Are The Arts' (yes, John Carey is involved...); and also Milton Keynes, twice - once here on the 16th May, once here on the 26th May. And will be talking on Marxism Today at the NFT very soon, and on Stirling a little while later, at Tate Britain on June 11.

New Book!

2011-04-01T16:33:00.001+01:00

Well, all 40,000 words of it anyway. Out early summer. Further details, needless to say, to be announced.

Details

2011-03-22T12:44:00.004Z

More at the Urban Trawl blog - some photos, and trawls of Preston and Barrow. Also this, in the Guardian a week or so ago. Now online too is an undeniably ill-tempered John Gray review. I had a migraine, it was boring, what can I say (other than it thoroughly deserves it).

Elsewhere: highly recommended are Giovanni Tiso on Blair (especially topical, as the cruise missile liberals are back) and Ben Pritchard on Jarvis.

Trying to Say Nice Things About Leeds

2011-03-18T15:22:00.002Z

A Walk around Holbeck

The centre of Leeds initially induced a kind of horror in me – a Manchester without the civic pride or the pop and radical history, an oversized Reading with a chip on its shoulder, a 'bosses city' of lawyers and stockbrokers, a city where hep property developers couldn't even invoke pop precedent for their Brazilifications of council estates (having lamentably ignored my slogan suggestion – 'Saxton – at Home You'll Feel Like A Tourist!'). There's little doubt that there's more to it than that, obviously. There's a lot here to like, if you can duck down into the ring road away from the regen and the 'Leeds look' – the Arcades, several rudely Ruskinian warehouses, Cuthbert Brodrick's astonishing town hall, Chamberlin Powell and Bon's University buildings; and it's also the last major city in the UK to have had a City Architect, John Thorp, who retired last year. He was not, however, replaced.

I must admit I was initially hard pressed to see how a city which had made so many enormous architectural blunders as Leeds, with its numerous wobbly roofed, terracotta-clad towers, could have passed through the inquiring eye of a Civic watchdog of some sort, except on the most superficial level – the use of red brick, terracotta and trespa to keep it 'in keeping'. However! The recently completed Granary Wharf scheme in Holbeck won a few architectural awards, and was widely recognised as some sort of valediction for Thorp on the eve of his retirement, so on a recent visit to the city the first thing I wanted to do was have a look.

Holbeck is at the back of the train station, reached by a labyrinthine route down steps, across canals and under arches. On the way, you see the work of Leeds' major 20th and 21st century architects, and it is not especially flattering. Here's John Poulson, whose one decent building, the Leeds International Pool, was recently flattened.

Lots of what at first seem to be the worst recent Leeds buildings turn out to be reclads and extensions of its worst 1960s towers. If there's a lesson in this aside from 'you can't polish a turd', it's that no convincing aesthetic of retrofitting has yet emerged, aside from cladding either in 'local materials' or brightly coloured plastic, and most heinous of all, adding on top the jolly regen wavy roof that Joel Anderson christened the 'Blair hat'. Surely this tower awaits both, although nobody will lament it when it occurs.

Then there's Carey Jones, who have stamped their, hmm, 'identity' on the city, and much of the rest of the North, in a mostly lamentable fashion, especially through the unforgivable Sky Plaza for Unite – though this car park is very far from their worst, being as aggressive and inhuman as the function necessitates. It's also a better bit of townscape than the yawning surface car park next to it. Leeds – 'Motorway City of the 70s' (!) is almost as much a motorcity as Birmingham, and its that hostility to pedestrians (outside the ring road) that helps make it so obnoxious. The best thing about the car park is this frankly unexpected Bugsy Malone ground floor. Marvellous.

And finally Aedas, a firm that began in Huddersfield before eventually becoming an Anglo-Chinese behemoth. Aside from the terracotta, it's hard to work out what makes their work specifically Northern – and maybe a Modernist argument could be made for this. It's an International Style, so why shouldn't Leeds look like a lower-rise, lower-density Hong Kong? Because it's boring, mainly. Bridgewater Place – 'the Dalek', as it is known – is inescapable here. It does have a bit of a futurist dash as a tower, a silvery tube of steel and glass – it'll be the kitsch of the 2020s or 2030s, and I suspect when its time comes, as it will, we'll all be trying to save it - but around the back the way it extends itself grimly along the street is particularly dispiriting.

There's nothing in principle wrong with Leeds' encouragement of towers, nothing at all – when cities impose height limits it merely results in lumpen, squished office blocks, and the more enlightened contextualist will note that Leeds has a tower tradition, from the Town Hall to the Tower Works. The latter, a series of three Italianate chimneys for a steel pin factory, is exactly equidistant from Bridgewater Place and Granary Wharf. It's a nice example of the Victorian need to accompany the terrifyingly new with the familiar and antiquarian, a 'future shock absorber', in Kodwo Eshun's invaluable phrase – although the sheer surrealism of these games of make-believe are part of what make them enjoyable.

Top Loiner Alan Bennett once suggested that, had Leeds conserved rather than demolished so much of its Victorian heritage, it might have become a tourist destination, like the Italian Renaissance towns which its architects used as a copybook. That's a little improbable – partly, because what is so much fun about the likes of Tower Works is the sheer coarseness, the references to elegant precedent necessarily being executed in rough red brick, and detailed by proletarians, not craftsmen, like these 'Brickwork' boys below. And if you want a Northern Industrial Renaissance city mostly undamaged by planners, it's only ten minutes on the train to Bradford. Not many tourists there.

The first interesting thing about Granary Wharf is that it has somehow managed to avoid certain contemporary clichés despite being designed by the very architects responsible for perpetrating them elsewhere. The bridge that leads to it, for instance, is not a white-painted Calatravan skeleton or a Wilkinsonian arch, but a Corten steel construction of sombre elegance. There's more of that to come.

The main architects of Granary Wharf are Carey Jones themselves, but everyone I spoke to in Leeds put its success down to John Thorp's direct involvement and an unusually enlightened developer. Certainly you can see the strictures of the Civic Architect here – a palette of brown Corten steel balconies and dark brick infill (into the usual concrete frame, obviously), and a form apparently dictated by an industrial building formerly on the site; but it's the absence of the Blair Hats and the bloody terracotta which are especially welcome.

The tower is very impressive – the irregular windows don't make a fuss of themselves, the cylinder is eye-catching, even -yech- 'iconic', if we must – without being egotistically Fosterian or cheaply Aedasish. So here, given that we have exactly the same architects – Messrs Carey Jones – and the same clients, in principle – these are luxury City Centre Apartments, in a city with plenty of empty new flats - the main question is: what went right? This is not a facetious question. Up the road is Carey Jones ' horrendously shoddy and drab Clarence Dock, which has bits falling off it already. But here, even the detailing is good, for God's sake. You could almost be in a country which took its architecture seriously.

The conclusion is partly depressing and partly encouraging. In the latter case, well – the City Architect triumphs, hurrah! - imposing coherence, urban order and proper design upon some usually pretty shoddy persons and places. This is especially pleasing. Recently Nick Johnson of Urban Splash answered a question at a RIBA event about whether or not Municipal Architects should return, thusly: 'I would no more trust a council architect to design me a house than a council hairdresser to cut my hair'. Leaving aside the chutzpah of saying this when you've bought up and sold as luxury apartments no less than four council estates, one of them in Leeds, this scheme is a fine rejoinder. And maybe, just maybe, the new City Architects could be designing the council housing that the 5 million people on the waiting list are waiting for. The other conclusion, which it would seem is a more popular one among architects, is that architecture is only as good as its developers, and hence we should be wishing for more enlightened property speculators to save us all.

After Granary Wharf, this bit of Holbeck need not detain us further, as it's mostly full of the 'Leeds Look'. This, an 80s movement to use local materials, pitched roofs and classical tripartite divisions in (mostly) spec office blocks, is in fact a great example of how design control can't stop godawful design by itself. Here, it means lots of business park buildings and lots of car parks. Hence, the problem with the area – which markets itself, take note, as 'Holbeck Urban Village' – is much more apparent. There's some good individual buildings, sure, but as planning the place is awful. The pedestrian faces innumerable nasty subtopian obstacles, like this delightful bit of counterintuitive barbed wire.

The real problem is twofold. Partly there's the sheer obstructiveness to pedestrians, with what are already baffling even by English standards lines of movement made worse by plenty of impassable surface car parks – three times I had to clamber over fences just to get from A to B, and I'm really not an athletic sort. Also, this is Leeds' industrial heartland, and the recent past, pre-City Centre Living, clearly still zoned it as industrial. There's nothing wrong with that, if we take – and why not? - the line, common to both Ian Nairn and Jane Jacobs, that the zoning out of industry has a deleterious effect on cities. But industry in the late 20th century meant the car, and more than that, it meant the lorry; and that means virtually no chance for density or urban coherence. So there's a lot of typically exurban 80s-90s industry/post-industry around, from light factory units to strip malls and car showrooms, which sit strangely with derelict mills here and mills-as-apartments-or-offices there.

So the light industrial units above are immediately facing...this.

OK, I'll concede - so here Leeds has something that neither Manchester nor Sheffield nor Bradford can match – the truly unbelievable Temple Works, a flax mill designed as an Egyptian Temple. In lesser hands this could be merely showy fluff, as those familiar with the Tobacco Factory, Mornington Crescent will know. Temple Works is an epoch away from that sort of Hollywood Egyptian. Here, at an earlier stage of the industrial revolution, Walter Benjamin's claim that the future carries with it the archaic can be seen at its most uncanny, and most physically arresting. It is all done with total conviction; the grey stone, the strong, aggressive detail, the sense of looming, compacted power. The birth of civilisation as the aesthetic for the birth of industrial civilisation, and both hungry for sacrifice. As a place to work in it must have been terrifying.

This overwhelming impression is from only part of the building – the roof recently collapsed, and it's currently undergoing emergency repairs. There's parts of it missing anyway - Temple Works originally had a obelisk chimney and a grass roof on which sheep were encouraged to graze: neither, sadly is there any more. There are plenty of other factories, though, with grass growing out of them, if you venture just a little bit further from the waterside regen part of the 'Urban Village'. Smashed windows and rot awaiting the next property boom. This area was the city's red light district for years, and just round the back of the City Centre Apartments is one of Leeds' poorest areas.

There's plenty of remains from the last boom along the Aire. BREAM 'Very Good'! Save 30% of Your Occupational Costs! There's a real desperation about the signs along here, with the trespa-as-stone delight of No 1 Leeds being especially keen...

Then you end up at a gigantic, alarmingly dense and domineering Carey Jones thing, then the centre. This one is in the real 21st Century Leeds vernacular, with the full vocabulary of bulk ineptly offset by metal balconies and terracotta cladding, which in this case apparently is a reclad of the local Post Office HQ. After making my way past it, I turn round to see what it looks like from the 'front'. I've been here before, and the wasteland from two years ago remains unfilled.

(cross-posted from the Urban Trawl blog)

Ruins

2011-03-16T15:24:00.003Z

Possibly foolhardy, this - but I've started a blog collecting various appendices and Urban Trawls connected to New Ruins and its furtherance, which can be found here. I've also taken the plunge and taken out a Flickr pro account, the first delightful fruits of which is here.

Further to the other thing: this, on Frederic Chaubin. Also, Ross Wolfe asks that I publicise his frankly monumental efforts to scan and upload the annals of Constructivism onto his excellent blog: which I am happy to do. The SA archives, or Izvestia ASNOVA, are especially essential.

and at Bowiesongs, via Pyzik, 'Warszawa'.

Life out of a Suitcase

2011-03-09T13:57:00.007Z

Some bits and bobs recently online; me not talking about the usual - specifically, SymbioticA's Visceral exhibition of art/science, for the New Humanist. In the same issue I review (and slate) the new book by John Gray which makes, oddly enough, very similar arguments to SymbioticA about the inability of human mind to truly comprehend the radically anti-human insights of its own discoveries, but the difference in execution is key... (apologies to the two women above if the photograph-taking distracted them from their work)

Also, a two-part (!) interview on Manchester at the excellent Manchester Mule; I'm also one of those in this series. Am still heading out around the country doing talks and such - in the next few months will be involved in promotional/talking duties of some sort in Leeds, Glasgow, Newcastle, Sheffield, Cardiff, Bristol, Milton Keynes, Birmingham, Liverpool, Wakefield, Lincoln and Manchester, so if you're in any of these let me know in the comments and I'll tell you where/when. Urban Trawl 2 is still in progress (off to the Valleys next, then Belfast, either Brighton or Blackpool, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Croydon and Plymouth); I plan to start putting photographs and the already finished BD pieces online, soonish. There are plenty of other things I could write about recent walks in Whitworth St and Ancoats, Govan and Kelvinbridge, so they will be posted up in the unlikely event I have time to write them. By October I will have seen everything I want to see in the UK. Except Hull. And Cumbernauld. And the Leicester Engineering Building. (drops hint). Then I will be writing the other thing, about Eastern Europe. On which note, anyone in Kiev this weekend or Moscow in a month or so, or Warsaw for much of the next two months who wants to say hello, please do...

The Hidden Abode

2011-03-09T13:41:00.003Z

...these cheerful informalities took little account of the geographic and economic realities of the business. For instance, all the actual products were manufactured in a factory in China and shipped across the world in containers before being driven here for eventual unloading and distribution. I had no idea how many people were employed in the Chinese factory, under what conditions, or what sort of hours they worked. Their wages would certainly be a tiny proportion of ours, a cold hard economic fact which formed the foundation for the entire structure of the company, and which was as taken for granted as the warehouse floor under our feet. How did my Chinese co-workers feel about their jobs? Did they resent our apparent freedoms? Did they have their own compulsory fun days? Every day we passed the same products between us, climbed in and out of the same containers, but there was no way of communicating. This only occurred at an executive level. I once overheard the managing director talking to the warehouse supervisor about a recent trip to China. Must be an interesting place, the supervisor had said. Not where the factory is, the MD replied, just acres and acres of industrial complexes. (No, I thought, that does sound interesting).

Another time I found a piece of paper lying around which appeared to be a photocopy of a close-up photograph of a product on a conveyor belt with figures partly visible behind it. The picture was meant to illustrate the right way to fix a label onto a box, I was told when I asked a colleague about it. But the photo wasn't taken here, I said, it must have been taken inside the factory in China! Look, I can see someone’s elbow! He agreed, but seemed unimpressed. And that’s as close as I came to getting to know my Chinese comrades.

Ivor Southwood's Non-Stop Inertia is an excellent, excellent book on work and non-work, and you should all read it forthwith.

Pig-Sticker

2011-02-18T18:34:00.003Z

OK, so today instead of doing intellectual wage-labour I did this, at ...And What Will Be Left Of Them.

Instead Of

2011-02-13T16:02:00.007Z

Still hiatused, but someone asked for some sort of events diary or something on here - so here it is.

The Pulp book is finished and is called Uncommon. It and two currently untitled book projects, one using the second lot of Urban Trawls, and one on Eastern Europe, mean that what might have been blog posts are sort-of embargoed until publication using some sort of personal paywall (though partly none of these walks are going up due to simple lack of any time, ever). Photos for both are turning up here, however, what with it being cheaper than a proper Flickr pro account.

Some of Uncommon might just trickle out into the excellent Carl Neville-helmed decade blogs - Faces on Posters, Too Many Choices and Up Close And Personal; when I get time I'm also planning something for ...And What Will Be Left Of Them? More on which soon.

Also, possibly more literally paywalled at BD - the third part of Urban Trawl 2 - This Time It's Even Bleaker, in Barrow-in-Furness (with the West Midlands in next week) two columns, one on Mukesh Ambani's house and one on Eric Pickles and the 'localism agenda', and a review of a book on Polish urban typography.

Some things in the Guardian - on the Elephant and Castle and contra Time Team.

Some forthcoming talks and things. Two of them involves being thrown to the lions, one on March 2, at Manchester Metropolitan University, debating Mancunia's regeneration with - oh yes - Ian Simpson and the head of Manchester council; and another at Ecobuild on March 1 in the ExCel Centre on the Royal Docks, where I'll expand a bit on this, from a little while ago.

There's also a talk on the astonishing Gosprom building in Kharkov, taken from the thesis I'm supposed to be finishing in the middle of all this, for the Twentieth Century Society's Megastructures lecture series, on March 3; and I'll be chairing for the Centre for Land Use Interpretation at the Architecture Foundation in London on 23rd Feb; speaking in London at Queen Mary on the 24th, at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on 7th March; and at this thing in Leeds Metropolitan University on 10th March, after which I'm off to Ukraine and Poland for a while, to 'rejuvenate'.

So, as you see, I won't be blogging for a bit. Read these people instead, as they are good. Jones the Planner, a very enjoyable Pevsnerian urbanist thing. There have been things happening, in the UK. Excellent commentary from, on one side, Labour leftist Owen Jones, and on the other, ultra-leftists Deterritorial Support Group and Alex Andrews. Note also, the continued adventures of the University of Strategic Optimism:

Somewhat less local, if you don't already go read Egyptian Marxist 3arabawy, incidentally as fine a photographer as political analyst. And last and by no means least, Nuits sans Nuit, with a series of three posts on Eastern Europe and pop.

People's Detailing

2011-01-22T23:44:00.002Z

Must report that blogging hiatus not likely to end anytime soon, but in the meantime, on the Festival of the Festival of Britain in the Guardian. 'Below the line' and everything.

2011-01-18T00:18:00.001Z

Trish Keenan RIP.

Why Have You Come to Mourmansk?

2011-01-17T23:25:00.005Z

A Red Army leaflet in mine (and formerly my Mum's) possession, recently requested by a correspondent. It is in fact an 80s reproduction, but after a fire at her house it took on its current, hauntological appearance...

X-posted at Found Objects.

Crepuscular Aesthetics

2011-01-04T16:34:00.007Z

Happy new year all from the veritable winter wonderland that is Warszawa. There will be no posts here again for a little while, because I'm working on a short Zer0 book on Pulp, finishing those blog posts that I never completed in the form of a cash-in book for the cash-in reformation.

ALSO ALSO

If I might, errm, 'crowdsource' for a moment, if anyone has a title better than either/both Razzmatazz or The Joy of Pulp, please please let me know in the comments...

In the meantime, here's some things made earlier:

On the aesthetics of Petroleum in Frieze, and the aesthetics of protest in Afterall.

Reviewing a book on Jim Stirling's Red Trilogy in Icon, one of several reviews I've written for them over the last few months but a rare one to make it onto their website...and - not online, but entirely corporeal - on the underpasses of Warsaw in East Midlands arty types YH485's 'Inside' newspaper.

...and presenting, ladies and gentlemen, the Speculative Realist blog generator.

The Monument to Polish Television

2010-12-23T00:04:00.010Z

The criteria we use to assess architecture can be slippery. That shouldn't be elevated into a virtue; much as I love Ian Nairn, the 'every kind of architecture produces good buildings and bad buildings, the only important thing is quality' line that he often peddled is as asinine as it is vaguely accurate. Without theory, without stylistic and ethical infighting, new forms and ideas wouldn't develop at all. Yet, there are some buildings for which any apparatus of aesthetic analysis is just inadequate, and where any notion of architectural 'quality' is irrelevant. The subject of this post, the Telewizja Polska building in Warsaw, recommended to me by Ms Agata Pyzik and designed by Czeslaw Bielecki, is one such structure.

It appears in a fairly typical Warsaw inner-suburban main road, a long and wide street with blocks of offices and flats set back from the road line itself. Most of them are in the unassuming manner you can see above, prefabricated mid-rises leavened by plenty of green space, trees and balconies. Opposite, approaching from the arterial Independence Avenue, you see something which looks like a fairly typical piece of corporate architecture, like many others in what Rumsfeld called the New Europe, which, unlike the former USSR on its borders, mostly favours a muted Frankfurt style with any excesses tamed, bar the odd more wilfully whizz-bang shopping mall; postmodernism got only a few years here, giving way to the style of EUtopia as a means of building-in any hopes of accession.

At this point I might have been wondering why Agata is taking me to this unprepossessing building. But there are two things about this place of which she has informed me; the first is about the political career of the architect. Bielecki is a former oppositionist under the People's Republic, and later Member of the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, where he represented Solidarity Electoral Action, one of the various more-or-less neoliberal organisations the 1980s' most successful working class movement splintered into after it received an electoral hiding from the former Communists. Polish politics is a complex and dispiriting thing which I only partly understand, but the latter party split into the current two main parties - Law and Justice, the Tories' coalition partners, socially illiberal and economically populist, and Civic Platform, socially liberal (by Polish standards) and economically unambiguously neoliberal. When we visited this place last month, Bielecki was standing for election again - this time for Mayor of Warsaw, with the backing of Law and Justice (he came second). The other thing which made this place worth a visit was, apparently, the fact that there is what seems to be a blatant stylistic reference to a certain famous Communist building.

The sober, curved façade that you see approaching from the main road changes abruptly when you turn the corner. This is the kind of gag that was much beloved of 1980s postmodernists - a building which looks like it's going to be one thing which turns out to be another! - but the sheer quantity of gee-gaws, devices and bits of frippery attached to this building is so prodigious that you can only gaze with something approaching (but not quite becoming) admiration. It's also worth pondering how the building's clients, the Polish equivalent of the BBC, would have presented Bielecki had he won the election, from inside his building. Would it have spurred rapturous coverage, so fulsomely had he jollified their work environment, or would it lead to a frequently televisually expressed grudge?

So it's all very much an architecture parlante, this thing. What this lifelong anti-Communist is doing whacking a fucking mirrorglass Tatlin's Tower into the flank of his wobbly curtain wall is at first especially mysterious, at least until you remember that one of the functions of the Monument to the Third International was as a radio broadcast centre for the Comintern, with its wireless waves circulating the message of World Revolution across the globe. Here, the same device is used to symbolise the circulation of television across Poland. And just as the spirals of Tatlin's visionary edifice were designed to suggest revolution and dialectics, here the landscaping is in waves. They undulate, wobble all the way towards the car park, in this landlocked city.

They wobble towards a completely straightforward functionalist car park. Here, presumably, nothing can be symbolised. What happens next, however, is pretty exciting. Well, it's hard to realise just how exciting until you investigate closely...

Not only is there the big Calatrava-on-steroids mirrorglass and white steel bridge that links the new building to Polish TV's earlier People's Republic-era HQ; there's other delights in wait also, as we wander round increasingly incredulous.

Not just the grand symmetry of the balls at the entrance to the car park...

...but also this, where you can see the thing burst with a flabbergastingly unabashed flourish out of the stone-clad 'sober' side of the building. Astonishing. What we're actually looking at here is the architecture that Terry Farrell in his most grotesque mid-80s pomp would have rejected for being 'a bit much'. Yet it's expressed with such demented gusto, and - in contrast to the many Stalin-via-Farrell atrocities that blight contemporary Moscow, Kyiv or Petersburg, notable for their crushing, blinging banality - it shows a real visual and architectural imagination, although not the sort that should usually be given this much encouragement.

There's public sculpture too, oh yes indeed. I wasn't quite sure what the green woman/alien below was all about, but you can see that she stands proudly below the part of the building where Bielecki shows off the fact that he is familiar with the work of Frank Gehry.

The main action is a globe atop some fibreglass ruins, which crumble picturesquely down towards that airwaves-themed landscaping. There's a space there that we thought was eventually intended for use as a fountain or pool of some sort, as if there wasn't enough going on already. The globe is there to symbolise the global reach of Polish television.

The artists are not in any way chary of letting us know who they are:

...in fact, in one corner of the symbolic ruins from which the Monument to Polish Broadcasting proudly emerges, is the credits for the whole thing, a list of almost hip hop-like length.

At this point there wasn't anything else we could do but bask in the building's ludicrousness, and the unseasonal November sunshine, unconcerned for the moment that the globe was in balance just above us.

Aside from a couple of Metro stations, the ever-more-peculiar accretions to the Warszawa Centralna station and a couple of churches, I can't think of a post-1989 Polish building that has transfixed me as much as this one - architecture here is wise to avoid the horrors that lie just past the Kresy, but is too often dull, a political analogue to the country's oft-expressed yearning for 'normality'. The most prominent works are often produced by middling American architects, whose towers now well outnumber the one very famous tower by a Soviet architect, which is well worth remembering. This building certainly can't offer any sort of way forward - that would be terrifying - but it has something. To borrow from Nairn again, maybe it's equivalent to the cautionary but guiltily thrilling likes of the 'architectural William McGonagall' Robert Lewis Roumieu, as this is a work that is truly nineteenth-century in its combination of devices and motifs developed by others spliced together by a spectacularly tasteless hack who has evidently found that tastelessness is his main strength. The Varsovians of the future will, I'm sure, look back at it with some sort of astonishment, as much as with a justified contempt. Let's just look at it again...

Merry Xmas!

The Ronan Points of the Future

2010-12-22T23:43:00.001Z

On student housing, in CIF.

2010/1968/1917

2010-12-13T00:33:00.005Z

In the context of numerous student occupations of their universities and mass demonstrations the seminar Marxism in Culture has organised a special session on 17th December at the Insitute of Historical Research, Senate House, 5,30. All welcome.

'Cultures of Occupation and Demonstration: 2010/1968/1917'

Steve Edwards
Introduction

Sophie Buckland
UCL Occupation

Daniel Lemberger Cooper
Royal Holloway Occupation

Jacob Bard Rosenberg
Birkbeck Occupation

Esther Leslie
Free Universities and Self-Managing Education

Warren Carter
Atelier populaire oui, Atelier bourgeois non: Posters and Graffiti in
May '68

Alberto Toscano
Between the Sociological Imagination and the Negative University: The
Occupations of the Sociology Faculty at Trento, 1966-68

David Mabb
Street Art of the Russian Revolution: Students, Teachers, Artists

See also, the boy like Rouge's Foam on these matters.

In Brief

2010-12-03T13:09:00.004Z

More on Zaha and their Absolute Returns for Kids at Architecture Today; and two possibly paywalled BD things; one hailing World Communal Heritage (on a similar note, boggle at these depopulated, elegaic images of the Heygate Estate, in Dezeen of all places, and quoting me unattributed); and an Urban Trawl on Preston. The former, as with Boro and the next ten, has excellent drawings by Laura Oldfield Ford, and again here's one above.

I'm also speaking this evening at 7(ish) at the UCL Occupation - in the Jeremy Bentham Room, no less - as part of a seminar on architecture and social change, which as far as I'm concerned must involve a critique of the poverty of student architecture.

Exposition (Corporate)

2010-11-29T01:45:00.006Z

It might sound counter-intuitive or perverse, but to really get the feel of futurism, delirium, pseudo-science and spectacle that should accompany any Great Exposition, you had to cross the river to get to the Puxi side of the Expo, or as everyone seems to be calling it, the 'corporate side' - the part that is a reminder that an Expo is, and always has been, one level little more than a glorified Trade Fair. Perhaps I thought that this was the area of true metropolitan thrills mainly because I got there as the lights switched on...

When you emerge from the Metro line that gets you from one side of the river to the other, the first thing you see is this - the sight of aforementioned concrete bridge illuminated in different colours (it's purple now, but in a second it'll be red, then yellow, then blue...) and, in the foreground, the sight of the turnstiles that process (some of) the millions of visitors. This is the Edutainment side of the river (a neologism I'm amused to find spellcheck now permits), a series of promotional and would-be-educational pavilions which may well be quite prosaic in the humid light of day, but which at night easily match their fancy-foreign-architect-designed equivalents on the other side of the river.

It's also here that the contradictions of the Expo's 'Green agenda' are most easily visible. Much attention has been paid to (eg) the sheer waste of the Expo (from its opponents) or to the use of electric buses as transport (from its supporters). On the Puxi side is the part of the site that indulges in some adaptive re-use. This was the industrial area of the city, and as its functions are hived off to the exurban pandaemonium of the Yangtze River Delta, it is freed up as another brownfield site, like any other in Northern Europe. As well as containing various shipyards, dock sheds and a power station, it was apparently also the site of the much older Shanghai Arsenal, the cradle of the Chinese industrial revolution - none of which has been preserved. Above is the Pavilion of Footprint, which has instructive material on the carbon footprint. It sits opposite OIL.

OIL is one of the most fabulous architectural objects in the entire expo, its polygonal form constantly pulsating with polychromatic electric colour, with Alsopian wonky pilotis underneath, similarly vivid. If there's one serious evident architectural innovation in this place, then it's the total fearlessness about using electric light in its most aggressive, least 'tasteful' manner, with extreme garishness and maximum effect. If you tried to do something like this in most European cities various excuses would be offered to prevent it - crassness, tastelessness, commercialism, 'light pollution'...or perhaps more convincingly, a massive drain on scarce energy resources. Yet these things are already lit up at night, so you don't bump into them. It's surely at least in part a continuation of Lenin's old equation socialism = soviet power + electrification, only with the first part of the equation forgotten. But it reminds of how Mayakovsky, when he wrote on Paris, scorned how 'the bourgeoisie, after inventing electric light, prefers to eat by candlelight'. The enduring affect of Shanghai as I remember it was a feeling of oppressiveness and difficulty interspersed with sudden moments of euphoria. Almost all those moments of euphoria entailed staring at neon lights. (or is this even neon? Is that a dated term for this light-technology?)

You see this approach to lighting in all manner of places, and it need not even signify 'futurism' or the metropolis - in Nanjing's historic centre, the ancient capital outlines its undulating and spiking roofs in contrasting strips of multicoloured neon. By way of comparison, imagine what would occur if there were a proposal to do the same to the dreaming spires of Oxford. Yet obviously there are certain unpleasant resonances, particularly in the case of OIL, which cannot be denied. The faceted end of it here is enlivened by a video showing oil derricks at work, which, like the skin of the building itself, is constantly changing. Inside, and hence the large queues, is one of those '4D films'; underneath, in English and Chinese, is a warning against pregnant women or those with heart problems entering the Pavilion.

This one, I know from the pictures at City of Sound, is of no interest whatsoever by day, a light-industrial shed of no note; but here, is the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion not at least slightly utopic?

Even more so, the Chinese Railways Pavilion, where the grid of the railways is the object of illuminated abstraction. If Expos are where an epoch dreams its successor, then the libidinal force applied here to the furtherance of public transport is somewhat more impressive than OIL; although here as ever there is never any sense that all these things can't happily coexist, no matter how antagonistic they might appear to intrinsically be. Again, it represents the ideal rather than the real, which in this case is the so-so mediocrity (in design, if not functional terms) of the Shanghai Metro.

Yet fittingly, given the central role of containerisation and shipping in China's rise to the world's second economic power, the thing here that is really special is the China Shipping Pavilion; here, as in Hamburg, containerisation chooses the best architects, perhaps in acknowledgement that it's a process which would have enraptured any Constructivist. This is another piece of adaptive re-use, this time of a shipyard, and the approach here - interestingly, given that it's there to represent such a closed and securitised system - is strikingly open. Piranesi comparisons are ten-a-penny over here, but there really is something sublimely carceral about these elevated walkways under the steel frame of the roof, all of them lit up for maximum noir effect; pace Non-Plan, it gives container shipping son et lumiere.

You can just walk up and wander round, here. No queues. There is an entrance at the side to the actual exhibits, but for the most part this is a permeable structure, which you can wander through at will, to your heart's content, although when I did so I can't say it educated me in any way about the activities of China Shipping. What it did do was offer a vivid sliver of Fun Palace openness and changeability, in a place which is otherwise based on a completely closed architecture. A city like the Expo would be nightmarish, largely because there's no courtyards, no indeterminate or communal spaces between - save for that lonely wetlands park.

The aforementioned closed architectures do throw up some fairly breathtaking moments, here very much by accident. I can't remember which the pavilion above and below are an advertainment for, but they are clear evidence that what might be mediocre blobitecture in daylight becomes something much more exciting when lit up, like strange neon grubs or larvae.

The above is a mere preamble to the corporate side's least popular, and for anyone expecting contemporary China to offer a viable vision of the future, most interesting Pavilion - the Pavilion of Future, heralded by a giant, illuminated chimney-cum-thermometer.

It's housed in a power station, just as it would be anywhere else, although they struggle to manage to fill the enormous space. Perhaps the reason why the queues are so short here (about 10 mins, less than the queue for Venezuela) is actually because this place doesn't get full easily. The Future Pavilion doesn't have any freebies, but it does have this:

It's worth enlarging this picture and boggling at it a little bit. In the stack here you can find a litany of urban utopias - Campanella, Plato, Francis Bacon, Fourier, More, Mumford, Wright, and the proverbial curveball, David Harvey's Spaces of Hope, sandwiched in just underneath The New Atlantis. The explanation for this collection is found on the opposite wall:

Yes, they really are saying that contemporary Shanghai is the fulfilment of the hopes of the generations, that they come to fruition here, in some manner; but this is not meant as a statement of complacency, far from it. In the room with the stack of books, various urban utopias, from Archigram's Walking City to the Ville Radieuse. There's a wonderful moment in the exhibit on Le Corbusier where, while in Europe or the USA you'd find the usual hand-wringing denunciation of all the evils he wreaked on the innocent slums, there's the line 'sadly, Le Corbusier's ideas were never fully appreciated in his lifetime'. Yeah!

After that, we're in the world of inexplicable symbolic sculpture. Well, some of it more symbolic than others:

...you see what they've done there?

This salvagepunk Miyazaki mobile, a city skyline pieced together out of broken electrical goods, is quite something; a more libinally charged image of the possibilities of recycling than the usual, at least. In fact, it reminds me a little of the work of the Trocadero's finest salvage artist.

Then we're back to the serious matter of the Future City and what we are going to do to truly create a Better City and Better Life. Here's a couple of suggestions:

The first, 'Space City' is proposed by the Lifeboat Foundation, a fascinating Libertarian eschatological think tank, which, in a piece of impressive synchronicity, includes the historian of the 1939 World's Fair, David Gelernter, among its members. The organisation was started after September 11, and its aim is to preserve the human race, and the entirely unashamed telos of their plan for our survival is to colonise outer space. These really are people who think it's easier - and more desirable - to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Click on the picture to read the simple explanation of how their space city will work. Next to it is Eco City, which is based on this book, which essentially appears to propose a 'sustainable' Industrial Revolution, which is surely something we can get behind, irrespective of the minutiae; though one of the authors designed an eco village in China which has evidently been fairly botched (although at least it got built, unlike the flagship eco-city of Dongtan. Which was supposed to be open in time for the Expo. Tellingly, it is twinned with the Thames Gateway...). 'We need to reinvent everything' is a criteria of Eco City.

This is Energy City. I can't remember what the idea behind Energy City is, other than continuing with the general psychotropic illumination that Shanghai already specialises in.

...but I know what this is - Water City, which proposes that we grow artificial gills. And 'the views would be great'; and here, the prophets whose future dreams may be fulfilled are Drexciya. It looks beautiful, though doesn't it? Although all that electricity might lead to hazards with the water.

The future cities in the Future Pavilion rest on certain major assumptions, some more debatable than others. The first is that cities cannot remain as they are; the second is that they will face enormous challenges due to drastic global warming; and the third is that all ideas are of equal value, and that there is no need to set up an opposition between Space City and Eco City. Everything is equally valid - the barest hint of a contradiction and you suspect they'd start worrying they'd end up with a Cultural Revolution on their hands.

So in the corner, not far away from the underwater aquatic city, is this model.

It's a maquette of a gigantic energy-generating complex, and oil refineries go next to wind turbines go next to oil tankers go next to a cubic power station which goes next to pylons which goes next to serried cooling towers, just like those lining the charred landscape of the Yangtze River Delta.

There isn't the slightest hint that this energy-generating complex in its lurid, apocalyptic, radioactive green, or OIL, or Space City, or the Expo itself, might lead to the situation described so cheerfully in Water City. Evolution, presumably, will decide for itself. Below is one of the entrances, its turnstiles strikingly empty. It's late, and soon the pulsating lights will be switched off.

Previous instalments in this now-finished series of ruminations: Flyovers, The Juxtaposition, Megalopolis, The Future of the University, Expo (International). Comments on this and those are very much appreciated, and thanks to anyone who had the patience to read all of them...

Exposition (International)

2010-11-27T14:31:00.011Z

It's difficult to quite capture the magnitude of the Shanghai Expo. In one sense, it's another example of the bizarrely retro-futurist nature of Chinese ultramodernity - the dams, the skyscrapers, the UFO-topped hotels, the neon - and here an Expo, the first to have received the slightest bit of public attention since Hanover in 2000, which was noticed purely because Kraftwerk did the (delightfully retro-futurist) theme tune, or the Calatrava-popularising Seville in 1992; but, basically, this is the first of any note since Expo '70 in Osaka. For Nick Land in his Expo book, this means China is waking us up from the long nostalgic sleep of postmodernism, letting us revel once again in the thrills of a real urban modernity. There is at least some truth to that. The first thing you notice in the Expo (above) confirms this, in that even here, the infrastructure is an enormous and unavoidable presence, the walkways lifting us from the tedium of the eyes on the street; and the second thing proves that things are really rather more complicated. That second thing is the queues.

This is the queue for the Australia pavilion. The Expo's site extends across an area on the scale of a decent-sized market town, on both sides of the Huangpu river, hence necessitating a metro line to get from the Pudong side (the international pavilions, the bit in the magazines) and the Puxi side (the national and corporate pavilions, a fascinating area so far only really profiled in English by Dan Hill at City of Sound); this comes free with your ticket. Reports suggest there were some major attempts to engineer the visitor figures above Osaka 70's record, with workers taken their on their holidays whether they wanted to or not; and those queues are astonishing. All around the site, giant screens inform you which Pavilions have queues that might last two to four hours. That most state socialist thing, an endless, bickering queue, dominates this showcase of dynamic, eclectic, ultra-capitalist spectacle.

And everyone not in a queue is taking photos. Like most of contemporary Shanghai, the Expo doesn't exactly discourage foreigners, but it's also pretty clear it's not for them; it's presented as a way of seeing the world without leaving China, as an enormous festival, as a temporary theme park, as an Olympics (the clean-up job on the city, in both senses of the term, was apparently more intense than Beijing's before 2008), a mass event, and emphatically not a matter for disinterested flanerie. It's about crowds, and woe betide anyone that can't take a heavy crowd here; by this point I had started to get used to it. Those crowds, or rather those queues, weren't so much there to look at the architecture, but the stuff inside - which pavilion had a '4D film', which had the best freebies, which was serving what food.

A visit was complimentary from Jiaotong University, and initially me and another participant in UK Cultural Week were taken by four young Jiaotong students; but Chris, who was writing (and has now written) an excellent essay on the Expo, which I shall plug when I know where it's published, had promised to meet me there, so I left my guides very quickly. Chris suggested we meet outside Venezuela; the route there took me through part of Europe. It's Bosnia that you can see above, one of many retoolings of a basic shed design provided by the Expo authorities for free for those who can't pay for their own architects. These decorated sheds had their moments, generally being more fun the less seriously they took themselves. Bosnia's child-art approach is curious, and certainly more interesting than the Czech Republic's good taste (though that looks interestingly like the fragments of a city map printed on the shed there):

...so the undisputed winner of the Denise Scott-Brown Memorial Decorated Shed Award is 'Europe's Last Dictatorship', the post-Soviet state highest on the Human Development Index, Belarus. This piece of Mitteleuropean silliness is perhaps inspired in some way by the Belarussian Marc Chagall, or maybe it's inspired by chocolate boxes, Soyuzmultfilm and neoclassicism, but it seemed the most popular of the sheds for photographers either way.

The other way to reconfigure the standard shed is by adding a bit of 'architecture' (usually of the computer-generated, parametric variety, based on The Fold) to the facade, like so (courtesy of Montenegro):

Venezuela, our meeting point, had far greater architectural ambitions, housed in a rather excellent pavilion by Facundo Teran, a dramatic but non-ingratiating sculptural creation, its clashing volumes centred (in a manner which distantly recalls Melnikov's similarly politically charged Soviet Pavilion at the Paris Expo '25) on a steep staircase. While I sat here, one - I would say definitely not Shanghainese - visitor came and sat his son next to me, and went off to take a photo of him next to this amusing Laowai.

The Bolivarian Republic is next to its comrade in Latin American Socialism, Cuba, but sadly puts it completely in the shade - even within the limits of the free shed genre, a hell of a lot more could have been done than this:

...which clearly shows the likely very austere grip of the current sacking-more-public-servants-than-Eric-Pickles Raul Castro regime. However, those of us who still hold out hope for 21st Century Socialism found a great deal to admire about the Venezuelan Pavilion - in fact, its similarity to Melnikov and Rodchenko's presence in Paris in 1925 or El Lissitsky's in Cologne 1928 is much more than an aesthetic matter. The queue, however, was pretty mild - a mere 15 minutes - despite the no-nonsense signage, suggesting that word had spread among Expo visitors that there wasn't much to see in here.

First of all, the pavilion makes very clear that it takes the Expo slogan 'Better City, Better Life' more seriously than does perhaps its originators, only expanding it out rather further, across 'Mejor Mundo'.

The theme of the Pavilion is, quite simply, 'Revolution' - and bear in mind here that the last 'revolution' here, in the late 1960s, is now held in massive governmental opprobrium. Here, as so often with the Bolivarian Republic, they talk such a fantastic fight that if I judged the place purely on this pavilion, I'd probably emigrate there at once.

How can all this not sound just a little pointed? 'Everybody may get involved and take decisions in politics, economy and culture'' " a country where all are included"; and surely a subliminal reference to Shanghai's hyperstasis: 'a revolution makes everything move again'.

This chap is one of several people giving testimonials of all the things the Bolivarian Revolution has done for them - stories of collective ownership, co-operatives, workers' councils, of expropriation, of non-alienated labour, told by construction workers, teachers, slum youth. Chris points out that 'nobody reads the signs on anything in the Expo', so it is perhaps a little misjudged in its heavily textual approach. He does find one gentleman reading them very intently, and asks him in Mandarin 'so what do you think of all this talk of revolution?' 'It's great - but it'd be a long story to tell you why', was the response. 60,000 people were displaced from their homes to make way for the Expo.

The Pavilion is a series of rooms with canted stairs going off at angles from them, and on the ground floor, open to the air, there are several definitions of what Revolution might be, printed on cotton blinds. It is, respectively, Individual Revolution, Collective Revolution, World Revolution.

There is another sort of Future envisaged at the Expo, which we will get to presently.

This central part of the Venezuela Pavilion is where the freebies are given out - here, it's chocolate and coffee, and on the coffee tables are, in classic national pavilion style, descriptions of the country's cash crops; and, in far from classic national pavilion style, descriptions of its class and historical relations, like the role of the sugar industry in the slave trade.

The part where all of this suddenly seems to be too good to be true is at the back end, where you get a lovely view of a steelworks, one of the few non-adapted parts of what was once the industrial centre of China's greatest industrial city. At the back of the Venezuela Pavilion are thousands of red, plastic flowers, with the following message:

True enough. As any fool knows, the Bolivarian Revolution's reforms have been paid for by oil revenues.

Yet if there's a cause for optimism in the Shanghai Expo it's in this place, somewhere which argues that better cities and better lives aren't caused by throwing tens of thousands of people out of their homes, or by 'civilisation' campaigns aimed at the uncouth proletariat. Architecturally, too, it's more rigorous than most, its pleasures and surprises discovered through exploration and circulation rather than in an instant hit, a sight-bite (copyright J Meades).

After this, it's pretty much all about the sight-bite. Some of these are great, some quite diverting (such as Mexico's giant bloody great multicoloured mushrooms, above), some forgettable, some awful in either a good or a bad way. I only covered Europe and Central/South America, aside from brief peeks at Australia (Parametric, of the bulgy organic variety) and Thailand (Disney Orientalism), so this is a pretty partial view, not including such delights as Foster's 'sand dunes' UAE Pavilion. As has been pointed out, there are two common threads to the Expo's eclecticism - a folksy doilytecture, and the inevitable Parametricism, and most of the below cleaves to that, with a couple of major exceptions, one wonderful, one hideous.

Even great sworn historical enemies are united in their love for the doily. Above is the Cossacky wobbly hetman hats of the Russian Federation...

...and here is the somewhat more successful doily style of Poland, which in this case is combined with another fetish, the Fold (it comes from Deleuze, you know). I was very keen to go into Poland so I could bring something back for Pyzik, but it had a two hour queue, and they wouldn't even let us into the shop at the back when we asked. A few weeks later, in Warsaw, I would find out what the tempting two-hour-queue justifying freebie was - a big bowl of Bigos. The person who told me this seemed a little embarassed that this was the representative of Polish culture and cuisine, but evidently the undeniably culinary-sophisticated Shanghainese disagree.

Much (even?) less interesting was Romania, although there was perhaps a reminisce or several here of earlier Expo buildings, with the effect resembling Bucky Fuller designing one of those wildly popular Eastern European green-glass malls. It was also the most authentically, tackily theme park like in feel, a feeling supported by this Romanian tourist board poster...

...the more High architecture here also refuses to take itself seriously, insists on its Irreverence. So the Austrian Pavilion, below, might seem like a classic bit of smooth (not striated!) Parametricism, organic and futuristic and so forth, but click on the picture and look at what's balancing on top of it.

The Silly is however best represented by the Netherlands. There has been a curious change in the political and architectural perception of the Netherlands from the UK in the last couple of years - from bastion of tolerance to centre of anti-Muslim racism, and from centre of modernist rectitude to apostle of the new pomo. Even such a vulgar Marxist as myself can't quite conjure up a direct explanation for this congruence (as the new Dutch postmodernism is so far from being comforting, classical and Volkish, so clearly poking fun at any hint of Heideggerian notions of eternal dwelling), but there it is. The Dutch Pavilion, by John Kormeling, is called Happy Street. It combines two big silly ideas - a giant flower and an airborne 'street' of typically Dutch houses (where De Stijl goes next to the gabled), where one would have been more than enough.

Opposite Happy Street is the People's Liberation Army:

Although quite frankly, this is them at their least terrifying, with a not particularly purposeful or drilled march I know not where including at least one distant straggler:

There are actually some quite interesting things in the sheer complexity of the structure, its winding stairs, stilts and walkways, making it seem as much MC Esher as MC Hammer; but there is still something grating; perhaps it's because the irony in Happy Street is laid on pretty bloody thick. The ATMs are in a part of the Happy Street called Happy Money.

A brief cameo for the British Pavilion, which surprised everyone in the British architectural press by having one, distinctive visual idea - trite as the 'seed cathedral' might be, a fine piece of Expo greenwash - and sticking to it, with nothing extraneous stuck on to explain. Inside, apparently, it's the RSC and David Beckham, but the absence of slatted wood or barcode facades is both atypical and welcome.

Its simplicity is equally impressive in the face of something like the Swiss Pavilion, where greenwash is expressed via the green roof and photovoltaic lights which constantly switch themselves on and off. The thuggery of the concrete pillars is a bit of a surprise, though, a rare bit of visible construction, and a reminder of the Expo's spectacular unsustainability.

Like Murphy's Armchair Review, I'm going to make a general exception to this tale of more-or-less-interesting eclecticism and muddle - the Spanish Pavilion by EMBT.

The idea here is as pat as any - the façade is pieced together out of wicker baskets, which is a Reference to local craft; and the aesthetic of wood and organicism is usually rather tired; but this is still the clear stand-out of the international half of the Expo. The difference, the distinction, is not at the level of the conceptual imaginary, but the tectonic physicality, the corporal force; the way the bits of wicker are assembled, the way they bulge forth, and the way that the wicker gives a bristling, uncanny force to the whole construction - if this plays with metaphors of the 'natural' then it's a monstrous nature, suggesting strange and beautiful creatures that we haven't yet imagined. It's a bestial architecture, at the same time as being clearly the most cleverly detailed and fastidious construction here. I didn't go inside; by some accounts, the inside is less successful; but of all the Pavilions, it is unexpected to find that the one made out of baskets is the one which (in architectural, if not, unlike Venezuela, social, terms) really suggests possible new paths for architecture - which is, after all, surely the architectural point of an Expo in the first place. If the retro-futurist conjuring trick is successful, and Shanghai 2010 really does come to be remembered like London 1851, Paris 1889, 1925 and 1937, New York 1939, Brussels 1958, Montreal 1967 and Osaka 1970, then this will undoubtedly be one of the structures whose dismantling we will mourn.

There are a few things in the Expo which will not be dismantled. The China Pavilion, a futurist-traditionalist red pagoda which you can see in the background of the Australia queue at the top of this post; the Expo auditorium next to it, the walkways and bridges, the Metro line (obviously), and, more interestingly, a 'wetlands park' in the marshes along the Huangpu.

This really is a remarkable creation, mainly because of the suddenness of the transition - one moment you're in a massive crush of people either wandering, photographing or queueing, the next there's almost nobody else to be seen, and given the 'civilising' obliteration of portside river traffic (the barge above is apparently increasingly a rare sight), it is extremely quiet. It has the feel of a place already forgotten, and has a magnificent view of the world's largest concrete suspension bridge (I think), just in case it all starts to feel too placid.

Small, rickety-feeling constructions are the main architectural intervention into the park. There's nothing to see here, and hence the frankly astonishing unpopularity - you wonder whether surely at least a few people might make it here to catch their breath after one of the crushing crowds or the endless queues, but seemingly not. Or perhaps nobody's here because they know they'll be able to come back to it later, as it won't be erased in a week's time (these pictures were taken a week before the Expo closed), but more likely its values are rather different to those of the rest of the Expo.

At this point it starts to get dark, and the blue neon switches on, as do the little lights behind the lego squares of the Serbian Pavilion (which 'derives specific code out of multitude'), leaving the Spanish Pavilion dark and darkling alongside; and it's time to cross the river to the other side of the Expo, for the delights of Oil, General Motors, the Pavilion of Footprint, Urban Best Practices, and The Future.

Earlier Shanghai posts saved from drowning: One, Two, Three and Four. Next and final post: The corporate side of the Expo.

The Future of the University

2010-11-22T09:58:00.010Z

Yesterday I had to give a last-minute talk to the occupiers of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, very much the University of London's vanguard for the last few years. I had to come up with something to talk about in about ten minutes, so spoke about the politics of University architecture. I wish I'd spoken about the malevolent student housing developers Unite, but what I did end up talking about centred on the suburbanisation of University Campuses, meaning that any protest that occurs in one can be easily localised and contained, and has difficulty appealing outside of its campus - Middlesex is a great example of this. But an even better example is Jiaotong University in Shanghai. The original campus of this University, in some 1910s and 50s buildings, can be seen above - right in the heart of the city, highly visible and tied into its fabric, albeit reached through easily closed gates. Now, the Chinese government has reasons to be chary about students' public presence. The University recently built a gigantic new campus right on the edges of Shanghai. To reach it, you must take one metro line to its terminus, then take another metro line almost to its terminus, then a cab. You arrive at this:

A telling alignment of Calatravan infrastructure and a ceremonial reminder of the presence of Expo 2010. Many students are enlisted as volunteers to escort people around the Expo. Architecturally, this giant new campus is the inverse to the Expo's deliberate spectacle, and in terms of planning it's astonishingly low-density, spacious - a shocking contrast with the hyper-dense centre, with one single high-rise as part of the complex. Here, too, there's little of the riotous kitsch (be it neoclassical or Futurist) that marks much Shanghai architecture - instead, much of it has a sobriety and tectonic rigour that is almost Brutalist. A Hannes Meyer would have recognised this - the first building you see as you enter the campus - as a Modernism rather separate from that of the Bund:

All around are the gigantic expressways, here in their less pretty exurban version, and one of them actually traverses the campus. We were told that this would soon be replaced with a tunnel, but it adds an interestingly dystopian aspect to an otherwise very clean and shiny place - and is surrounded by an interestingly unplanned expanse of scrub and waste.

Just next to it is some graffiti, one of those 'informal' art forms that some get very excited about, but by contrast with the wasteland behind it, it seems remarkably directed - the most polite graffiti imaginable, most of it in English - jolly, unthreatening, a way of enlivening the otherwise worrying view of a University being something cars travel over.

One of the academics at Jiaotong's aesthetics department described the halls of residence below to me as 'Stalinist', and I'm not sure whether he was referring to their Khrushchevian prefabrication or the more Sotsrealist use of pitched roofs and decoration; but either way, it's clear that the curiously Stalinian turn of architecture under Chinese neoliberalism has not gone unnoticed. But note, again, that they're in a totally CIAM landscape, a series of blocks in parkland, with lots of light, air, openness, although not all that much protection from the humidity for anyone walking round taking pictures.

That entrance isn't really the showpiece of the Jiaotong campus. That would be this:

This is what sticks in my memory when I think of Jiaotong. The nearest comparison for anyone British, and one provided by John Baldwin, one of our party, is Milton Keynes. A grid, with wide, wide roads, wide plazas-cum-pavements, and buildings that are equally minimal and cubic, and almost entirely low-rise. It's a non-place urban realm, then. What is different is the design language used throughout, which is mostly red brick and red tile, with a couple of excursions into white-rendered concrete. As said, in places it almost seems Brutalist, in the original truth to materials and walkways sense. It all has a rectitude which feels very, very un-Shanghai. But controlled as it might be, there are things here which are not wholly determined by the logic of domination.

There's an enjoyment of walkways and projections which is quite seductive, and has the very sensible functional purpose of screening from the atrocious heat.

Much of this place - with major exceptions, which we'll come to - is determined by some very high modernist notions of good taste. I'm told that the tension above between rectilinearity and curves was determined by traditional Chinese aesthetics and notions of balance, but it seems equally likely that they saw some Vesnin brothers buildings in a textbook. In fact, there's a fair bit of Constructivism here, as we shall see - but the most memorable buildings are the quasi-Brutalist teaching blocks.

These teaching buildings are marked by their circulation - a rather unexpected, for this profoundly disconnected city, streets-in-the-sky, deck-access approach. Off the decks are the classrooms. The circulation is the main expression on the elevations, again in an impressively rigorous, high modernist manner, as if this sort of consistency could only be tested out on the outskirts, away from the centre with all of its architectural (and perhaps social) irrationalism and unpredictability.

In the ground floor entrances, everything is buffed to a stunning sheen, squeaking with cleanliness. Bubble-shaped lightwells at a slight hint of CGI whimsy, but it's on a very minor level. If this is the future of the university, it's not worrying for purely architectural reasons, as here there is, in fact, at least some application here of the ideas in modernism which were not solely devoted to spectacle and Entertainment. It's more worrying because it's such an enclave - a whole new town, but a new town which could be closed off and locked down with the greatest of ease.

That said, there was no doubt here that I would have to completely rewrite everything I had to say in order to make even a modicum of sense here. Initially, assuming that because of the architectural press' China obsession that I'd be speaking to a group of kids who discussed Bjarke Ingels over their tofu and would already know everything I was going to say backwards, I had planned a precis of the Psuedomodernism stuff from book and blog. When we found out that Jane Eyre was the scheduled film for Jiatong's UK Cultural Week, we realised some changes would have to be made...Near to the lecture theatre was this:

If anyone wants to translate for me.

No hammer and sickles were detected as part of this building, but it is strikingly Soviet, in the Constructivist sense - all red-painted steel and De Stijl-like geometric complexities, the most sculptural and dramatic moment in a campus which could clearly care less otherwise about being sculptural and dramatic. Its projections and cantilevers greatly enliven the riverside path through the campus.

There was an Expo-associated campaign to do away with this kind of English-ish signage. Which would be a shame...

The comparison which is pretty unavoidable in a place like this is the business park, that embodiment of the decentring and disurbanising of capital, and some of the buildings are more business parkish than others. This certainly is:

Three identical blocks with a strange combination of Mendelsohnian ribbon windows and 'stone' detailing, they're a reminder that it's incredibly difficult here to demarcate architectural history into modernism, postmodernism, psuedomodernism, as I was planning to do to the Jiaotong students - because here you can see all three being employed all at once, with - typically - no apparent sense of contradiction. Elsewhere, this becomes even more obvious:

First of all, notice the neo-Chinese vernacular bridge. These bridges, complete with Victorianesque lamp standards, run through the entire complex, including those parts of it which are otherwise notable for their redbrick modernist consistency; but it would be hard to imagine the two being considered here as part of separate political-aesthetic moments. What is particularly striking is the neo-Victorian block behind, with its Bundish clock tower. You could imagine the whole thing in the UK in the early '90s, although without the clipped, machinic detail that gives the whole campus a sense of cleanliness and precision that British Modernism (or pomo) has never been able to muster. Maybe there's a hint of Aldo Rossi too about this place, in the sense of timelessness - not 'timeless' as in classic, but timeless as in 'where am I? What decade is this? Why has everything gone so quiet?'

This plaque doesn't quite provide an explanation.

Chinese Universities have, according to some accounts, been keen to eliminate some of the more dubiously Enlightenment subjects, with talk about doing away with Philosophy departments altogether. Perhaps, when our neoliberal educational consultants talk of the new, vocational, helps-you-get-a-job and stops-you-having-any-funny-ideas University, it's somewhere like the outer-suburban campus of Jiaotong that they're thinking of. If so, it's worth pondering for a while this scene of emptiness and exile.

Earlier Shanghai posts that would otherwise fall down the back of the sofa: One, Two and Three. Next up: The Expo.

Inbetween

2010-11-22T09:43:00.005Z

Back in Blighty until at least the new year, so am likely to be bored and disgruntled enough to the posting a lot. Jiaotong and Expo posts should be up in the week, and after that there will be lots and lots about Ukraine, especially the Metro systems (cos unlike Moscow you can photograph them without worrying about being interned), the every-bit-as-flabbergasting-as-you'd-hope Gosprom and much else in Kharkiv, and some Brutalist-Socialist Realist style-meshing in the otherwise elegantly crumbling Kiev; both of which will be going towards another project which I probably shouldn't speak about yet. Meanwhile, those who are chary about 'another long essay about architecture in Eastern Europe' (hello Bat!) should find me being less extensive elsewhere.

Eg: on Pathfinder, perhaps the only urban planning matter on which me and Simon Jenkins could ever agree. There's also an interview on literary site Words Without Borders where I attempt to sort-of sing the praises of London; and some links elsewhere - you should be aware of Tom Cordell's wonderful film Utopia London, a historically astute, detailed, poignant and visually ravishing film on post-war rehousing's successes, rather than its endlessly mulled-over failures; it's now slowly making its way into (some) cinemas. Also, I mentioned Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius' Tower Block a while ago, without knowing it was out of print - but I have been informed there's a website, which includes the text. The interesting thing about the book is its attention to the other side from the Lubetkins and Neave Browns, who by now are probably abhorred largely by the ignorant - instead it focuses on the non-architect designed, the standardised and system-built, the things that no-one ever seems to talk about. So, go read.

BD

2010-11-12T16:46:00.004Z

I've got three things in BD online or print this week: a review of an Arseniusz Romanowicz exhibition in Warsaw Powisle station, an online interview, and (drum-roll) the return of Urban Trawl! In Middlesbrough! The usual expanded version will be up on here in the next couple of weeks with plenty more on the joys of Teesside, but in short I shall be exploring the UK's nether regions for another year. Other destinations will be, and recommendations/dirt are requested for Preston (already done alas, so no time for recommendations), Barrow-in-Furness, Birmingham, Bristol, South Wales Valleys, Belfast, Edinburgh, Aberdeen OR Dundee OR Cumbernauld, Blackpool, Croydon and Plymouth.

I think at least two of the above might be paywalled, but it's fully worth paying in this particular case as the second series is being accompanied by drawings by the one, the only Savage Messiah. One is pinched, above.

Commercial Break

2010-11-10T16:59:00.005Z

To briefly interrupt the obsessive-compulsive Shanghai posting - part three, on high-rises, is below, and there's more to come on the Expo and a new town/University. I have been asked to draw attention to the following events where I will be publicly pontificating in London and elsewhere; at the South Bank on 22nd November, at the LRB Bookshop on 25 November, at the Canterbury School of Architecture on 2 December, at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton (hooray!) on 9 December, and at a Philosophy Football Xmas event on 17 December. I will also be involved in more geographically interesting pontification at Kyiv Offline in the Ukrainian capital next week. Am intending to get some Constructivism-spotting done in the second city, Kharkiv, beforehand - any recommendations for either city much appreciated.

Some press: very happy to be in the Manchester Evening News. Also a review at the Independent, along with Miles Glendinning's new book, which I must read - his and Muthesius' Tower Block is a lost classic; and the aforementioned review by me of Ben Myers' Richard. Also, some new things on the blogroll which I very heartily recommend: Labour Partisan, the Charnel House (currently putting together an excellent Modernist Archive), the paintings and writings of Marika Kandelaki.

Not being in the UK, I can't say anything much about it, but things appear to be happening in London, with the first proper public reaction to the cuts - students, actually sticking up for themselves rather than the distant other! Viva my Alma Mater, and follow Penny Red on Twitter, who appears to be in the thick of it.

Megalopolis

2010-11-09T13:24:00.011Z

If all that sounds like I have a problem with the ubiquitous high-rises of Shanghai, then that's not quite it. In a conversation when here, my Chinese-speaking interlocutor interrupted my spiel on the skyscrapers here with the well-placed phrase 'Koolhaas alert!' and one of Koolhaas' smarter statements on matters East Asian was that it's somewhat unseemly how Europe is so panicky and hand-wringing about high-rise when in much of the rest of the world it's just the normal means of accommodation. Yet the high-rises here are as strange, fascinating and worrying as anything else here, a form which has gone mutant, and as Koolhaas is one of the few to have ever seriously analysed this - by which I mean in the absolutely peerless 'Junkspace', not in OMA's sillier or more glib pronouncements and projects - to end up with a certain amount of Koolhaasism is an occupational hazard here. This post is about the Megalopolitan side of Shanghai, its skyscrapers and intriguing lighting systems. The picture above is, in fine tourist style, the view from my hotel window. This is a view of Xujiahui, one of the Shanghai districts which were designated as capitalistic Special Economic Zone in the early 90s expansion of market reforms that followed the 1989 protests and the Tiananmen massacre. It's dominated by two towers called the 'Grand Gateway'. They do something rather typical for Shanghai. Mostly, they're smooth, SOM or late-Foster glass skins, but at ground level they're typical pink-glass shopping malls, the sort of tat you'd expect to find in 80s London or today's Moscow. (the really interesting thing, the lights, I'll get to later in the post. As you can see it looks equally odd, if less glamorous, in daylight:

The fact is, architectural periodisation is completely meaningless here. In my lecture to Jiaotong, I was originally planning to talk about the movement from a Modernist architecture through various versions of Pomo to the Pomo-eats-Modernism style that I've called Psuedomodernism, but looking round Shanghai I realised it just doesn't apply. Here, there wasn't really a socially engaged CIAM Modernism in the interwar years, there was Moderne, Art Deco; after the war, Stalinist Gothick and unpretentious (but hardly modernist) utilitarianism prevailed - and now, in the skyline, you can pick out everything from historicism to pomo to Constructivism to Expressionism to serene Miesian Modernism, with the only logic seeming to be that rather chaotic notion of Harmony and Pluralism. So basically, the only bit of my work left was to argue for the politicisation of architectural form, and that's what I'll at least attempt to do here. There is one unacknowleged influence here, as far as I could see, and it might well be completely accidental, is Stalinist architecture. I'm not using that as a pejorative, but as a description.

Above is a typical example - serried, identical towers, with south-facing aspect, generously proportioned windows and breathing space inbetween, which are dressed with clearly machined-ornament, whether at the top or in the 'brick' coursing you can see at the corners. It's not the crass, appallingly planned, architecturally illiterate, Zhdanov-goes-to-Vegas Yuri Luzhkov style drolly described as Capitalist Realism, but something with rather more conviction and thought behind it; it comes out of a combination of market preferences which the UK market, for instance, is unwilling to service (the south-facing aspect), and state edicts - the pinnacles that you find on every block and which have such an effect on the Shanghai skyline, are the result of state policy, to stop extra floors being built on top, as they were in boomtime Hong Kong; like the New York Zoning Code analysed by Hugh Ferriss, Corb and Koolhaas, is dirigisme leading to delirium, rather than a pure, Babylonian capitalist potlatch. What it really is, is the CIAM goes Classicist, and here we should remember that the architect Andrei Burov, one of the CIAM's 20s Soviet contacts, was later one of the leaders of Socialist Realist architecture, pioneering the use of prefabricated ornament in monumental construction. Much of contemporary Shanghai is the fusion of Burov's two preoccupations into a new architecture.

The block above does this with more demented panache than any other I see here - the sheer length and height of it, slathered in all kinds of prefabricated 'stone', with the particular approach coming very, very close indeed to the style of 1950s Moscow; except rather than the boulevard-and-courtyard approach, it's towers geometrically organised in parkland. This is another unphotographable, because this is one of eight identical towers stretching all the way past a main road in the southern suburbs. The lower, retail block in front is part of the same tabula rasa. The approach makes me think of the notorious photograph of a statue factory in the 70s USSR churning out identical Lenins, and I'd be intrigued to see a picture of the ornamental production line. Elsewhere, you occasionally find a pure example of a neo-Karl Marx Allee approach, although these were almost completely unphotographable....more often, you have small pavilions to the street and towers spiralling off into the distance just behind, of staggering density.

So in short, contemporary Shanghai is in many ways the fusion of the two architectures that contemporary urbanists find most uncomfortable - the repetition and lack of any 'street' in CIAM/Athens Charter high modernism, and the imposingly monumental, obsessively ornamental approach of the Soviet Union in its fully Imperial, pre-Khrushchev pomp.

Appropriately enough, there is one fully fledged example in central Shanghai of the full-blown Stalin style - the former Palace of Sino-Soviet Friendship, one of those peculiar 'gifts from the Soviet people' that were built in satellite states in the early 1950s - see also the Stalinallee, the Warsaw Palace of Culture and Science...with the difference that China was never really a satellite, and after the Sino-Soviet split it became the Shanghai Exhibition Centre (and I think 'Top Marques' is another instance of Luxury Time). Aside from all the Corbusier-meets-Lev-Rudnev, which is more prevalent in the residential suburbs, the main influence - and I hesitate to call it that - is the Manhattanism that prevailed before Mies made it across the Atlantic, and similarly it's a serendipitous consequence of planning edicts.

That's not to suggest that it's all a pure matter of importation and adaptation. In one of the extraordinary essays in his 1998 Terminal Architecture, the late lamented Martin Pawley included one on 'Asia Reinvents the Skyscraper', where he pointed out how all of the innovations in skyscraper construction since the Sears Tower and the World Trade Centre were completed in the 1970s took place in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Taipei and (lastly) Shanghai, while Europe and America retreated into the aforementioned handwringing. He'd no doubt have added Dubai and Abu Dhabi if he'd written it a decade later, but as it is, the analysis is about protectionist, developmentalist capitalism rather than neoliberal dreamcities. It discusses overlooked architects like C.Y Lee, and argues that they started to influence international architects like SOM and KPF, not the other way round. However, the difference with Shanghai is that it already had a skyscraper urbanism 60 years beforehand. It's the lowest of the blocks above, crowded by its grandchildren.

The Park Hotel was designed in 1932 by Ladislaus Hudec, a Hungarian architect, and it partakes of the clinker Expressionism of the period - it's like something in Hamburg, only gone up to full skyscraper velocity, but with a very similar approach to the Baltic nautical style. It's rather beautiful, and coexists rather well with its groping-for-attention partners, like the wonderfully absurd UFO-topped Radisson.

Inside, though, it's not quite so Expressionist. It's the international luxury style of the 1930s, an opulent streamline classicism that could be found in the Queen Mary, or indeed in the Overlook Hotel.

There's a similar sense of guilt and horror just offstage from the dinner jackets and bobbed hair. So in amidst the dancehall scene above, there is someone impressing upon you that you have always been the caretaker.

Cognisant with the claim, expressed a little while ago that Liverpool was the British Empire's main attempt at a real 20th century urbanism of steel frames and high-rises, a lot of Shanghai looks like Liverpool. The still-extant firm Palmer & Turner were evidently the colonial W.A Thomas - and note that Palmer & Turner are now wholly an Asian firm. This is the clocktower of the racing club, from whose racetrack the People's Square was created, and from which you get a marvellous view of the Puxi skyline, where the 1930s are hardly visible, though the ten-storey Shanghai Number One Department Store can just about be seen in the bottom right-hand corner.

The towers take the planning requirement for an anti-speculative pinnacle very seriously, setting out to use it as an excuse for proper Hugh Ferriss/Fritz Lang/Raymond Hood spectacle, to varying effect. Some of them have a Babylonian power which marks them out as true successors to 1930s Spectacle-Architecture, the attempt to ennoble and glorify hotels, trading floors and suchlike. The aesthetically worthwhile ones are in the minority, but they're also often the tallest. The largest above is the Shimao International Plaza, the fourth largest in the city, designed (apparently) by Ingenhoven, Overdiek und Partner, East China Architecture and Design Institute. Like lots of these things, it's mostly a hotel - 48 of its 60 storeys. Those prongs at the top and the general thrusting gives the requisite sense of the overpowering, a latent violence and paranoia. As does this:

There's not much in the way of even today's circumscribed avant-garde in the Shanghai skyline; the starchitects are elsewhere. There's Holl and OMA in Beijing, Hadid in Guangzhou, but here the main monuments are by Skidmore Owings and Merril, Kohn Pedersen Fox, and of course John Portman. Below is Tomorrow Square, another of Portman's hotels. Portman is Fredric Jameson and Kazys Varnelis' favourite, the hotel designer and entrepreneur whose LA Westin Buonaventura was the Jameson's defining moment for postmodernist architecture – a new architecture which, in Jameson's case, very presciently had nothing to do with the shortlived Michael Graves/Terry Farrell bells and whistles ornamental style, although that too has many descendants in contemporary Shanghai. The presence of Portman, always an exemplar of the entirely unashamed melding of art and development, is another reminder of how a socially concerned Modernism makes little sense in the Shanghai cityscape. What Portman's firm are very good at, however, is designing sleek and sinister buildings, and Tomorrow Square is a marvellous example of it - mute, inscrutable, and like the Shimao, with a science fiction hint that all that frippery at the top might have some function, as a launch pad, or in some way be convertible into some piece of technological villainy.

In 'Communist' China, some – like Nick Land in his book on the Shanghai Expo, which is worth a whole other essay – seem very pleased that Modernism in Shanghai essentially picks up where New York left off before the 1932 The International Style exhibition, before the central Europeans with their Commie ideas got in the way of Manhattanism's path (in its Shanghainese form), interrupting the play of eclecticism and miscegenation, and of spectacle. Land laments the Style's purism, as most sensible historians would, but given the cheerleading for Chinese neoliberalism, it's also clearly an argument based on expunging much of what is relevant in Modernism to our wildly unequal cities, leaving it also as mere style, just not a style of unadorned surfaces and flat roofs. Eclectic spectacle, purist spectacle, it's all much the same, and neither have much to do with, say, Brutalism or Constructivism – but the aesthetic charge of the Shanghai skyline is furious and undeniable - at times, at least.

The name Tomorrow Square evidently has some reference to the People's Square it stands in front of. So what is the connection between Tomorrow and the People? In 1989, People's Square was a place of assembly and protest but it didn't see any massacres, apparently because of the constant presence of armed forces looming over the plaza. The Shanghai authorities' handling of the situation earned them a prominent place in government – Jiang Zemin, most obviously, whose Three Represents became Chinese neoliberalism's numerical successor to the Four Olds and the Four Modernisations. The square is of course loomed over by these skyscrapers, but also by a far less interesting city governmental building -

Evidently the Party has little interest in emulating the capitalist delirium all around, or even at joining in the extraordinary CIAM Stalinism of the outlying residential areas, instead providing something sober and bland, with perhaps a little hint of the Fascistic stripped skyscraper style favoured by the Kuomintang, more of which later.

The square is filled also with various kinds of advertainment, like these corporate pavilions, which help to keep any more dubious uses at bay.

Around is the pedestrianised strip of Nanjing Road, and more Manhattanism. This angular tower-and-base design with skyway round the back is a superlatively cranky composition, a much earlier example of the interesting things that can occur with ultra-density, when you have to force a tall building rudely into a site. You will also note that the neon lights are about to start coming on.

To fit with the general tourist-itinerary tone of this post, an excursion to The Bund, the command centre of the International Settlement in the semi-colonial era, is in order – because it's a very interesting place indeed – and so is a trip back indoors, to the portals of Palmer and Turner's Peace Hotel. The Hotel is of almost-skyscraper proportions, slightly smaller than the Liver Building; and the opulence of the place is matched only by what is, by contemporary standards, a rather small scale, with no vast atria, although the construction technology would have allowed at least a grander entrance than there is here. It's very much an earlier, more buttoned-up opulence than the dance-before-the-Japanese-come style of the Park Hotel, opalescent and exquisite. There's one section where reliefs show the hotel as it fitted into the cityscape at the time, with rickshaws passing by. This is what it looks like now, the one with the green mock-Chinese peak, anticipating the legally obliged peaks of today:

Next to it is the same firm's Bank of China building, which Chris considers to be an example of 'Kuomintang Fascist architecture', combining the symmetrical, stone-dressed modern classicism of Mussolini's Italy with fairly tacked-on Chinese details. The pronounced vertical emphasis, though, puts it squarely in the almost-skyscraper category – in fact, this one can probably get the 'almost' taken away. It was finished in 1937, the last on the Bund before the very similar neo-deco Peninsula Hotel, which is Shanghai's foremost example of Luxury Time. However, the people in front of it are photographing in the other direction. You will be able to see why presently.

The Bund's curve along the riverside now faces one of the unambiguously Good Things about contemporary Shanghai, a fantastic public space, an Improvement made as part of the Expo year. It's one part riverside promenade and one part square, and it is absolutely full of people, all photographing each other, as it should be. The tower just behind the 1910s-30s skyline was, we were quite sure, a direct transposition of the Ziggurat in Metropolis, and it has one of the most compellingly megalopolitan architectural elements in the Shanghai skyline – a searchlight as part of its illuminated crown.

This is the Custom House, the Liver Building abroad - the most Liverpudlian building ever erected outside of Merseyside. There are currently proposals from Chinese property developers to build around the historic Liverpool skyline a 'Shanghai-inspired' new high-rise district in order to return the favour, but the city seems less than keen, which is a little unsporting. These photos are all taken after the lights went on. They come on roughly all at the same time, between 6 and 7pm. They vibrate, they pulsate, they shimmer different colours, they declare different slogans, and they give the effect of a city of excitement and melodrama, somewhere which, like New York in the 1930s, ought to be inspiring great poetry, films, and music, but strangely doesn't actually seem to be, by all accounts (I'm told by everyone that the art and music scene in 'bureaucratic' Beijing is far superior). If the architecture has antecedents in Sino-Manhattanism, or China's transcendence of Manhattanism as described by Pawley, then the lighting has more in common with the abstract play of light in Weimar Germany, the sort of thing profiled in Janet Ward's Weimar Surfaces, more than it does of the dully literal advertising lightscape of 1930s American, or the simple giant banal adverts of contemporary East European cities. The lights are mostly not really selling anything in particular, their spectacle is more complex. The floodlighting of the Bund is part of that rather than a historicist riposte, establishing a link between the two eras of determined display. The more raffish buildings are especially appropriate – here, the Hugh Ferriss Babel of Broadway Mansions is dressed with yellow neon, the very English-industrial bridge in front in vivid red.

Many of the Bund's buildings have the red flag of the People's Republic flying from them, something which forces me into a minor double-take, realising that it signifies something quite different here, or rather it does now. The Custom House's chimes play 'The East is Red' on the hour – no, really, they do. It was the first time I'd heard it, other than Holger Czukay's version. The smaller, earlier public space here is where the notorious sign that didn't actually say 'No Dogs or Chinese Allowed' but did say something very similar in more polite language used to be, and it now has two monuments to the revolution that ended that.

One of them is typical figurative flag-waving hurrah socialist realism, and aside from a couple of curious snappers, lots of whom must be provincials up for the Expo, the large crowds entirely ignore it. The Monument to the People's Heroes, meanwhile, is completely abstract – it could be a monument to practically anything, and it could be admired by a Speer as much as a Mies - which doesn't stop it being a rather powerful sculptural object, its rectitude a contrast with everything around as much as its high-rise form is a complement to it. Whether it conveys the Chinese people's struggle against imperialism and capitalism is less certain.

So I've held off from this for too long – the architectural money shot, if you please, the thing that everyone in front of the Bund was taking photographs of rather than of the Bund itself (developmentalism winning an aesthetic victory over imperialism, there). A clear view of skyline like this is pretty damn rare in Shanghai, because of the height of everything else and the ubiquitous smog, so when you get it it's all the more breathtaking. This is the skyline not of Puxi, the only built-up side of the Huangpu river until the early 90s, but of Pudong, the area that is really an entire new town which sprang up from marshland after Shanghai was designated a Special Economic Zone – something the Chinese government originally refrained from, in order not to encourage the massively uneven development that made parts of Shanghai into one of the most modern cities in the world in the 1930s while grinding poverty stalked much of the rest of the city, and of China. That the return to fully uneven development should coincide with the notion of the Harmonious Society is one of those ironies of history.

The skyline itself as the lights come on, like the expressways at night, is a joy that only a churl couldn't be in any way moved by, as if the Empire State Building couldn't be enjoyed because of the Dust Bowl (some did argue that, of course). To pick out details – the giant illuminated globes again, Adrian Smith's smooth, tapering, gorgeously elegant World Financial Centre, the improbable declaration 'I Heart Expo' on the part of the Taiwanese Aurora company's offices, the pulsating lights extending even to the Expo-sponsored sightseeing boats (replacing much unsightly freight)...and, in the form of Oriental Pearl TV Tower, the curious feeling, once again, that you've seen the future somewhere before...that the future resembles very closely the past's idea of the future. It's the Space Needle or the Berlin Fernsehturm with an extra spiked bollock. There's no time, evidently, to imagine a new idea of the future.

On my second day here, as we sat in a cab careering northwards, Chris argued that what looks like it's moving at a thousand miles per hour is slowing down – that the famously accelerated growth rates are falling, but are still high enough (and the promise of success, symbolised by that empty Prada in Nanjing, is enough) to prevent any explosive social unrest; yet the country's 600 million poor peasants aren't going to be on Luxury Time any time soon. In short, that China is actually approaching the stationary state, that it will soon enough be the most powerful country in the world and still a poor one. I found this hard to take when careering down a ten lane expressway lined with gargantuan skyscrapers, that made the place I'm coming from seem utterly petty and provincial, but after ten days and several books it started to sink in. Perhaps one concept that could be applied to what's happening here now is one taken from music, Simon Reynolds' notion of Hyperstasis. A whizz-bang brightly coloured gymnastic everything-at-once eclecticism which, while enormously immediate and sometimes completely thrilling, almost seems designed to hide the fact that no new forms are actually being created, that there are no new ideas behind it, and that any alliance between art and politics, any revolution of everyday life, has disappeared from the agenda. The hyperstationary state?

The little red flag in the background is an accident – I would have tried to get it in shot if I'd noticed it. As mentioned, the lights all come on between 6 and 7, but the concomitant of that is that they all go off at around midnight. The apparent reasoning behind this is derived from environmental imperatives – all that wasted electricity – but the effect is 'ok, you've had your fun, now go to bed'. The intended effect of the lights might be to present a vibrant and delirious techno city that never sleeps, but it's hard to be the city that never sleeps when you have to get up at first thing in the morning for a day of hard, hard work.

Earlier Shanghai posts that would otherwise fall down the back of the sofa: One, and Two.

The Juxtaposition

2010-11-08T15:28:00.029Z

While I stood taking the photograph above, a sardonic voice from behind me said 'ah, I see you're doing The Juxtaposition'. 'It's ok, I did that all the time the first few weeks I was here'. The Juxtaposition is, however, all but irresistible for the amateur architectural photographer in Shanghai, as many articles and collections have made clear. So here is The Juxtaposition in its purest form – a decidedly low-rise, tumble-down old Chinese street, with washing and power lines criss-crossing above your head (the washing lines have apparently been attacked in a 'Be Civilised!' campaign on behalf of the city government, along with the wearing of pyjamas inside) that terminates in a skyscraper.

The point of The Juxtaposition is that it's the easiest way to capture in a single image the process of either a) the unrush of development that is soon to transform everyone's lives for the better, or b) the way that wealth has hardly 'trickled down' in contemporary China or c) the denigration and domination of traditional housing in the form of imported skyscrapers, depending on your aesthetics and politics. It's a potent image, so here it is again -

This time you'll notice that the more ostensibly traditional houses are in rather better condition; as are many of the courtyard and terrace housing compounds that still make up a large proportion of the city, and once made up its majority. They're not what they seem at first, and to straightforwardly call them 'traditional' or 'indigenous' or whatever is to make something of a category mistake. In fact, the main forms – the alleyways of the Lilong, the redbrick compounds with their stone gates called Shikumen – are as much a product of modernity as anything else, a form of speculative housing created in the early 20th century combining 'Western' models – the English terrace, the profitable maximisation of space, and quite often art deco detailing – with the hyper-dense models of Chinese cities. The photograph below is another way of doing The Juxtaposition. Again, the low-rise housing with the washing hung out to dry, with this time the skyscrapers in the further background (this is a question of angle – just behind, but at a tricksy angle are the massive towers and malls of Xujiahui), and if you look closely at the windows, you'll notice that they look like Crittals – the same metal windows you'd get in a 1930s semi. Which is also appropriate, as there's also a lot of 1930s semis in Shanghai.

The climate is not that of the places where 1930s semis are usually to be found. The city is stiflingly humid, even in October, and there's all all-pervasive smell which seems to be made up equally of exhaust fumes, open drains, sweet food and the plane trees planted everywhere by the French when they ran (this part of) the place; and all this is at its worst in the areas where there's most space and least shade. An extremely dense Lilong area like the one below is, for all its deficiencies of private space, climatically highly appropriate, the way the houses rear up to provide access and enclosure also a means of catching one's breath. It's an excellent way of (unintentionally, no doubt) providing a truly pedestrian architecture. This is where one might lament the destruction of these forms in favour of a pomo-meets-Corbusier landscape of towers and expressways, but actually this place is recently renovated, and in excellent nick, right down to the small details.

This sort of light, small-scale preservationism is not what is generally expected here. Some of these dense low-rises have been even more heavily Regenerated nearer the centre, selling various nick-nacks, with the probably unintentional effect of making the place feel like The Lanes in Brighton in clientèle, product and urban form. Here, more happily, it's just housing.

The place above is something else entirely. There is, famously, a housing development on the outskirts of Shanghai called Thames Town, which simulates suburban England; yet that's not merely some Evil Paradises-style innovation of the neoliberal city, but also a continuation of the urbanism of the International Settlements, when Shanghai was a semi-colonial city with an intricate proto-Apartheid system. The former French Concession is full of these houses, and at first I thought this was the one which was once home to the 1930s city's most famous infant resident, JG Ballard, because of an article at Rick McGrath's site that I found via Ballardian a little while ago, which showed how the house had been taken over by a restaurant called SH508. While I'm not entirely certain, I think this is actually the house the restaurant owners moved to when Ballard's old house was demolished, but if so it's not at all dissimilar. They were already building the disingenuously traditionalist, hedge-protected, class-and-race-ridden world of classic English suburbia here in the 1920s – or was it partly an import from the imperial periphery into the imperial centre? There's an essay surely waiting to be written that places the birth of suburbia, as a way of sheltering from the urban proletariat, in the colonial city rather than Letchworth or Bedford Park.

The gates at SH508, worn and tagged, have a visible zig-zag and circle motif which you could easily imagine on one of the more raffish semis in East Finchley.

Yet even more than in North London, you have to leap through a fair few hoops in order to take photographs of these houses, so heavily guarded are they by sundry gates, hedges, driveways and walls. Both of the houses above were photographed through the gates, with only the vaguest notion of what the photographs would look like after. Some of the villas are picturesquely worn, some of them so heavily restored that it's very hard to tell if they were built in the 1920s or 2000s. Not for the first or last time here, my finessed Hegelian ordering of architectural history is completely confounded. Is this kitsch because it's a recent remaking of a colonial villa or is it kitsch because colonial villas are inherently kitsch? Or both?

The block of flats below, for instance, with its red brick and its 1930s frieze, is apparently a recent new-build. I'm lost, and would stay lost for most of my ten days.

Lots of the villas were subdivided during the Cultural Revolution, when briefly Shanghai was the Shanghai Commune, governed by an alliance of non-state bodies – militant, factory-based bodies like the Workers' Headquarters - which had in mind something resembling the Paris Commune. An optimistic Maoist would be pleased, then, with this shop sign.

In Shanghai, the largest industrial city in China at that time, as it was until very recently, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was more a genuinely 'proletarian' thing than a matter of student Red Guards having pitched battles with each other, something analysed in this book. Here, if not elsewhere, the Cultural Revolutionaries' logic was undeniable – in a city this dense, it is and was obscene for one family to have so much space to themselves. What makes this place so unlike Finchley, or, one suspects, Thames Town, is the sheer closeness of such typical suburbanism to, not only the extremely dense Chinese compounds, but also the ultra-metropolitan architecture built in a more obviously European style. Take this, a typical piece of late 19th/early 20th century Groszstadtarchitektur, occupying an entire block, which is right next to several one-family villas, like the burbs were built next to the metropolitan centre.

This is all a mild digression from the main matter of The Juxtaposition, because these photos might lead one to assume that the villas exist in their own space, that a viable suburbia could still exist in the centre of Shanghai. On the contrary – most of them are loomed over by high-rises. The example above, next to an intriguing, almost brutalist-meets-deco-meets-Chinoiserie block of pre-war flats in purple engineering brick, has banners on it which I'm told are protesting the apparently poor remuneration being offered by the city council to purchase the plot.

Here The Juxtaposition is once again in full effect, with the sheer gigantism of the towers making their precursors look even sillier. On close inspection, there's rather a lot going on here. What you have is, facing the street, basically what would have been facing the street in 1937 – the villas, obviously, the shops and restaurants, and also clusters of small blocks of flats, sometimes with architectural ambitions, like these Frank Lloyd Wright projections – and behind them, tower after tower of residential flats. I'm guessing here, but this might be the result not so much of demolitions as a genuine, legit example of what the somewhat hysterical have lately taken to calling 'garden grabbing'.

Yet there are still many of these villas and low-rise blocks of flats in the French Concession, particularly strangely, lots of them aer left lining the main road, Huaihai Lu. On a train to Nanjing a few days later I flick through a bilingual in-train magazine, which has an article profiling this 'aristocratic' street and one of its former inhabitants, an industrialist who was involved in philanthropic causes of various kinds. The article was centred on the question of what really makes An Aristocrat, and asked in conclusion – is the true aristocrat merely someone who drives an SUV, who buys expensive gadgets and clothes, and surrounds himself with beautiful women? No – a true aristocrat is someone who is highly educated in arts, culture and science, keeps appraised of the social issues of the day, and donates to charitable causes. The ideological implications of all this were too much to think about on such brief acquaintance with contemporary China.

There are still, if you have someone telling you what to look for, ways of discerning the class and national differences in these places, though. The proliferation of satellite dishes in the block above, for instance, is a sign that it's a block occupied largely by expats, as, in a less high-tech version of the Great Firewall, Chinese residents are discouraged from getting dishes, lest they pick up television of dubious provenance. I did get the chance to watch some legal Chinese-English television, in a Nanjing hotel. It was a show called Luxury Time, in which a Chinese presenter spoke to a French couturier about the fact that he makes his clothes in China, something deeply unusual in the high-end market. As the presenter repeatedly pointed out, the moral of the story is that China can produce niche goods too, not just mass-market sundries (This luxury has a Potemkin quality, sometimes. Nanjing, a place even more precipitously uneven than Shanghai but which I spent little enough time in to feel less qualified to pontificate about, has the most strikingly empty branch of Prada). Those socially concerned aristocrats, again.

It would be a fallacy, meanwhile, to assume that villas = rich, high-rise = poor, as the really untrained English eye might. These gates open out to a gated community of enormous concrete towers, not of little houses with gardens. The development, again in a strangely Brightonian moment, is called Embassy Court.

The long art deco block above is also, if scaled down a little, something you could imagine on the Sussex coast. It is after all the sort of place those who used to live in the villas here might have moved to after 1949.

Of all the pre-war architecture left around – apart from the 1930s' almost-skyscrapers, more on which in the next post – which I got to see, the most memorable was the Shikumen. The comparison which is apparently usually made is to English terraces, as mentioned, and you can see some of that – and these are denser, deeper and darker than the most intricate and harsh of West Yorkshire back-to-backs – but this compound, at least, was apparently built for clerks, who could afford the elaborate ornament, rather than industrial workers, who presumably had to make do with something even smaller and darker; but, again, the darkness, if not the smallness, is a very rational approach to building in a place as humid as this. At the entrances to these courtyards there's usually a chap keeping an eye on the place, and a board with some information in Chinese. Chris was usually translating these, but stupidly I wasn't taking notes. Without wanting to denigrate in any way the much-overlooked (by the English at any rate) virtues of gigantic, serried and identical tower blocks, these courtyards and alleyways do feel genuinely special, with a feel of community and collectivity which feels very rare in any contemporary housing. Yet it would be ridiculous to insist that a population continue to live in places this cramped. Is there a way of replicating that without retro-kitsch? Could, or does, Shanghai have a Park Hill, a place that tries to transfer this accidental ethos into something truly modern?

At the entrance is a name and a date, 1927. The year that the first, abortive Communist Revolution broke out among the proletariat of this then-industrial city. It escaped to the countryside after being slaughtered en masse, returning 22 years later after having to gradually rewrite its theory about urban and industrial primacy inbetween. This photograph was taken directly opposite the sixth photo down on the Flyovers post, so while the picture does not contain The Juxtaposition within it, The Juxtaposition was most definitely present in the area.

An orphaned photograph, off the very central track of the rest of this post, the reason why this is so appalling is because I made several attempts to photograph it over several days from both metro train and cab, and this is as good as I got. It's an example of the tabula rasa urbanism of the southern districts that stretch out between the central and the suburban campuses of Jiaotong University, and it's here for its sheer incongruity, for not matching with the subject matter of the other posts, while at the same time seeming oddly typical of the things you see when travelling through the outskirts of Shanghai. It's a Klimt building! The Shanghai Secession! This piece of gratuitous Junkspace contains sgraffito work copied from the Viennese soft-porn decorator's corpus, and a silver Josef Hoffmann entrance. There are, as we shall see in the next post, many different ways of building where nothing was before, and this is one of the more symptomatic yet surreal approaches – to create here a version of Old Europe that could never, ever have existed in this form. In its wilful miscegenation it's in the tradition of 1920s Shanghai, a place which clearly always excelled at The Juxtaposition, both in architectural terms and in terms of having the extremely poor in the closest proximity to the extremely rich.

Yet the final juxtaposition here is to stand in for something I couldn't photograph. It might be the largest city of the world's largest manufacturing economy, but Shanghai itself is deindustrialising, and the Expo is on a massive brownfield site, just like the Stratford Olympics. What the city really makes its money from is a property boom, just like London. There was something horribly depressing in that realisation, akin to the amazed incomprehension when you check China's world position in terms of size of economy (2nd) and per capita income (99th, below Albania, Jamaica and Angola, amongst others). Yet, as soon as you're out of the city, you're in the Yangtze River Delta, one of the most heavily industrial areas in the world, a mostly-continuous strip of cooling towers, factory farms, blast furnaces, big sheds and cities, places like Zhenjiang, the size of or double the size of Birmingham, each crowned with a couple of their own glittering, Jin Mao-style Chinesesque skyscrapers among the residential high-rises. You could see whole new towns, which nobody has moved into yet - not that you could always tell the difference, as the railway station platforms never have people on, as they file onto the platforms from airport-style waiting rooms above, leaving all these enormous cities looking disturbingly empty to the passing commuter. This is a ground zero of primitive accumulation, the contemporary equivalent of the charred, destroyed landscapes of the north of England in the 1820s, an apocalyptic pandemonium wrenched out of the paintings of John Martin, set in and consuming an incongruously placid wetlands landscape.

Europeans born after the 1970s haven't ever seen an industrial economy going full-pelt. It's an incredible and horrible sight. I couldn't photograph it as we were on a high-speed train, which went from Shanghai to Nanjing in just over an hour – it takes 6 on the normal train. The nearest approximation to it of all the photographs I did take is the one above of some of the suburban landscape on the way to Jiaotong. Round here, it's all factories, instant cities and messy, gimcrack commerce, and in-between are small strips of the rural, with amputated villages and peasant remnants peeping out. When I took this, I thought I was looking at a wasteland in the foreground, but looking at it now, I wonder if these might be allotments.

Flyovers

2010-11-04T16:08:00.009Z

'Nothing in this world develops absolutely evenly; we must oppose the theory of even development or the theory of equilibrium.'

Mao Zedong, 'On Contradiction', 1937

First of what will be several Shanghai posts over the next week or so, to try and avoid the gigantic-post-which-nobody-reads problem of an earlier excursion to Moscow. Thanks are due to Justin O'Connor, Chris Connery and Ma Haili.

There is a theory about the People's Republic of China, voiced most recently in Boris Groys' intriguing, if historically nonsensical The Communist Postscript, that what seems like merely the administration of capitalism by an oligarchy that is a Communist Party in nothing but name, is actually a gigantic, prolonged version of the New Economic Policy embarked upon by the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s – the use of a dirigiste, state-planned capitalism to build up productive forces to a level where the population has gone from being poor to being reasonably comfortable, after which the Communist Party could take command of this wealth and use it for the building of full Communism, something which can, after all, in 'stage' theory only be achieved after the development of a mature industrial capitalism. This is at least what Deng Xiaoping always claimed was going on.

And this stage of 'building up the productive forces' has lasted thirty years - why not? Lenin, for instance, clearly envisaged that NEP would last a lot longer than the 8 years it got before it was replaced by Stalin's forced collectivisation, chaotic industrialisation and total suppression of private commerce. If we make what seems – with good reason – to be a rather extravagant theoretical leap, and see this as a super-NEP, what could the future Communist China do with the hypercapitalist infrastructure, the gated communities, the skyscraping office blocks, of the largest Chinese (and, in terms of 'city proper', largest world) city? One symptomatic question is – if, as is often claimed, China is making the world's biggest investment in green technology, then what are they going to do with all those flyovers?

Shanghai is laced with elevated roads, all built over the last ten years or so, at roughly the same time, but to rather more impressive effect, as the Metro system. That system of private transport is very nice, but aesthetically forgettable; this system of flyovers is monstrous, dominant and utterly unforgettable. Chris Connery, who is showing me round the city on my second day here, tells me of a conversation he had with a Party member, on the (apparently still extant) left-wing of the CCP. When global warming really hits, when the oil runs out, and the use of the car has to be curbed, what will the Party do with all this? Can they just ban people from driving? Will people accept it? Yes, was the reply, but the Party merely lacks the will. So before I had even seen these constructions, I had in mind the idea of them cleared of the traffic which is too thick and dense even for their astonishing capaciousness, with bicycles and walkers making their way along these lofty elevated roads. They're one of the most impressive works of engineering I've ever seen, for the less than impressive function of moving the private car with its internal combustion engine from A to B – though, at least for the moment, taxis are so abundant and so cheap, sometimes equalling the levels of private cars, that to call it wholly 'private' feels a minor misnomer.

After driving along and under a few of them in a dazed, numb state when off the plane, the first of these flyovers that I really saw was in a working class district in the north of the city, near Caoyang New Village, a 1950s housing development which Chris was showing to his students. The area around it was so impossibly dense, the width of its expressways so yawning, the clusters of towers so high, the metro station toilets so abject (the PRC's inegalitarian public convenience policy receives a severe reprimand from the Socialist Lavatory League – in an area where there are likely to be westerners present the loos are impeccable, elsewhere they're some of the worst I've ever seen) and the crowds so massive that I simply gave up and went back to bed, taking the photograph above of two towers seemingly being eaten by the flyovers before passing out.

Much of my time in Shanghai was spent commuting from the centre to the suburban campus of Jiaotong University (subject of a future post), so I saw some of the infrastructure in the areas where outsiders aren't generally looking. While the flyovers in the centre have the smoothest-finished cream concrete you're ever likely to see, here it's a much more standard material. They still tend to be rather dominant, but they're not meant to be looked at, and they travel through what is still a heavily industrial landscape, with huge factories on either side of the motorway. While some flyovers are meant for spectacle, these don't feel like they're meant for people at all, instead inducing the feeling of being a vulnerable fleshy part of a metallic network of freight, lessened only by the all-too-human aggressive driving that is ubiquitous here. There was one horrible moment on one of these expressways where various container lorries constantly overtook each other, manoeuvring into position to the point where it seemed as if they were actually intent on crushing the pathetic little car we were in. But, as I said, many of the flyovers really are meant to be seen.

Above, you can see one of the flyovers rising gingerly in the vicinity of some 1920s courtyard housing, which will also be the subject of the later post, but it's a mere preparation for what comes next.

Near People's Square, the former racetrack for the Europeans transformed post-revolution into a large public plaza, there's some sort of flyover convention, an intersection which is less spaghetti junction and more the intestines of a terrifying mythological beast. These sorts of organic metaphors tend to come to mind here, because there's little rationalistic or machinic about this place. Anyway – the three images above are there mainly to indicate the sheer, unnecessary height of these things. Note not only how the concrete itself is of the very highest grade, but also how there is planting running half the way up the concrete pillars, an effort at civic beautification which is visible mainly to the pedestrian, more than to the driver. Presumably this is there as a gesture to The Harmonious Society, with nature intersecting with technology in non-antagonistic manner, but it's far more like the engineers kept in mind the possibility that sooner rather than later these monuments will be obsolete, so made them pre-ruined, with picturesque vegetation creeping up them to simulate what they might look like when they've fallen into desuetude.

They also serve to frame the skyscrapers around, to delineate them, present them in their best light, to let them be seen from a contemplative distance, which gives a futurist flash to what can often seem crushingly dense and badly made on closer inspection. Except that's the sort of thing only noticed later on – you don't notice the details. When I first saw this intersection, I was absolutely frozen in awe, and then impressed by the fact that everyone else seemed entirely used to it, that it had become normal, just something you'd cross under on the way to work. There's a general ability to seem completely unbothered by what feels like a bloody steamroller of gigantism and force here which is admirable, although slightly worrying....Groping around for comparisons, the nearest thing seems to be the spidery expressways of Los Angeles - but those course through a low-density suburban sprawl, rather than charging through super-dense conglomerations of competing skyscrapers. But here too, any putative Reyner Banham would probably find that the flyovers are the main event, works of public infrastructure more impressive than the baubles on top of the towers of capital. Their forcing through areas of already huge density necessitates an extra pedestrian layer being inserted into them – there's plenty of these intersections that have pedestrian walkways running across, such as the blue steel and glass pedway sandwiched between the roads in the last of the pictures above. There you can also see a pillar with some dragons on, which as I recall is some sort of tribute to the non-human forces that made this intersection possible.

Yet throughout Shanghai, and here especially, it's hard not to wonder – how does this work, how does this sustain itself, and how do you get to the point where you're entirely blase about all this? Looking up at the flyovers, I'm as completely at a loss to get any impression of how all this works as I would be looking at an electrical diagram. Look at the second of the two pictures above – I'm only capable of interpreting it as an abstract sculpture or as a shocking biomorphic organism – a potentially lethal one, in both cases - but not as a road, I'd have to live here for a while for that prosaic familiarity to come. In terms of confrontation with an alien and awesome modernity, I feel here like the proverbial European visitor to New York or Chicago around 1920; the components of this cityscape are all familiar, there's no objects or forms I haven't seen before, but all of them have transformed into monstrous and illegible new combinations. There's all manner of fallacies the European in Shanghai can fall into, either of uncritical awe or knee-jerk repulsion, and I was at various points subject to both in my ten days there. This post is all about the awe, the repulsion will come in later, hopefully also with something less predictable. So – awe.

Keep the not-so-small nature of combined and uneven development out of your head for a moment, and the 'Shanghai as the Future' argument is the most seductive one of all the potential futures on offer in the dubious field of architectural futurology. To the untrained eye – very untrained – this seems the more preferable future city, more than the hooray-for-shanty-towns strain or the isn't-Dubai-like-super-interesting strain; the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen is a long way from the centre of Shanghai, and the ugliness of primitive accumulation is less immediately apparent; and I didn't see anyone sleeping under these flyovers. But the real reason why Shanghai-as-the-future is so convincing is because it looks like you imagined the future would look like when you were 14 years old. If the primary coloured wipe-clean architecture of New Labour Britain was designed by and for overgrown infants, Shanghai seems to have been designed by and for overgrown adolescent boys.

It's as if the engineers, architects and planners watched Akira and, rather than, say, picking Richard Rogers' plans for Pudong, looked at the dystopian animated city and thought 'hmm, let's build that instead.' We'd be fools not to indulge the disappointed teenagers who hoped the 21st century would be a damn sight more aesthetically invigorating than Greenwich Millennium Village. If you feel you've been denied the future, then to find it elsewhere looking exactly like you expected is a little uncanny. Disappointing, if you thought the future should be qualitatively rather than quantitatively different from the past. Yet Shanghai's sheer revelling in its own modernity is very difficult to resist, at first, and it's most difficult to resist when you travel along the flyovers at night. It doesn't seem to have a function, this lighting. 'What's this for?' I ask Chris, somewhat taken aback. 'Aesthetics!' he answers.

For the moment, then, let's completely abandon any critical edge and just salute the preposterous place, stare in abandonment at a city which lines its fucking flyovers in endless strips of blue neon at night, that makes the mundane act of driving into an abstract procession of light and geometry, that intensifies the process of commuting into this outrageous onrush of non-objective sensation. There are apparently a lot of car crashes in Shanghai.

You eventually reach ground level at something like this, with pedestrian walkways cutting across neon-lit geodesic domes, skyscrapers with searchlights cutting through the ubiquitous fog, and some rather familiar corporate logos. This massive project of state-built infrastructure is the less trumpeted of the major public works in the city. There's the Metro, of course, with nine underground lines built in the time it takes to string a tram line from one side of Manchester to the other, but there's also the Maglev magnetic levitation train. I didn't take it, although by all accounts it's marvellous, for the main reason that it gets you – at record-breaking speed! - from the airport to the tabula rasa business district in Pudong, which was not where I was going. The Maglev might be the one area where the prolonged NEP of the People's Republic entailed doing something differently, where it put a genuinely advanced technology at the service of a public, rather than private means of transport, but compared with these monuments to the hope, as P.J O'Rourke delightfully puts it, that 1.3 billion people get a Buick, it seems paltry indeed.

Within Walls

2010-11-02T13:49:00.013Z

More ports. There's a second post on Hamburg which has fallen down the back of the sofa because I started it weeks ago - here it is. There will be some more, ah, exotic posts on here soonish, but for the moment my inclinations are pulling me somewhere more familiar. 'What do you think of the walled Old Town?' asked Matt Poacher a little while ago about one of my Southampton writings. See, Southampton has the largest stretch of medieval walls in the UK, outside of York. The truth be told, apart from post-wedding boozing and visits to Eric Lyons' Castle House, I don't spend much time there, and as with Southampton University, more fool me, as it's actually a very smart (if perhaps unintentional) bit of townscape in the Gordon Cullen/Pevsnerian sense, but architecture is fairly little to do with what makes it good. The relevance of this with reference to the demise of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment will be an additional subject. This post, even more than with Oxford, is indebted to Pevsner's half-finished Visual Planning and the Picturesque.

It starts, as it should, with an overhead walkway, joining up two broken parts of the walls, alongside a derelict 60s building with 2001 windows; the view is terminated in typical townscape style with a tower, which here is Lyons' council slab block, the area's best building. You have to ignore WestQuay for this walk to be enjoyable, but after that, pickings here are rich - what is interesting about this place is the various attempts to build within and around ruination and fragmentation, some of them quite successful.

Firstly, there's some of your actual architecture here, courtesy of non-Smithsons-employing Brutalists Lyons Israel Ellis - simple, robust blocks placed in amongst the bombed-out fragments of Georgian and Victorian housing - but they pick up the rhythm and unpretentious vigour of the surrounding buildings. Crucially, they don't pretend to be suburban or small-town.

This is exactly what all the subsequent architecture does, and to enjoy it this fact has to be accepted. Most of it is 1980s housing association design, deeply provincial, anti-urban and occasionally rather twee - but what it does, and does well, is set up interestingly reciprocal spaces, create some sort of intrigue in the movement uphill, and framing some unusually (for the south of England) generous public spaces. Here, for instance, the 80s blocks are genuinely quite pretty in their interaction with the sloping site and the existing remnants.

The walls themselves were restored by Leon Berger during his heroic 50s-60s tenure as head of the City Architects Department, and they're pieced together in an unassuming and frankly Brutalist manner, the roughness of the concrete linking bridges fitting the functionalist harshness of the 13th century encampment very nicely.

What is even better is the way that they really encourage exploration - there's an invitation to try to find out how to get under and around these bridges, and when I was little this was exciting stuff - a playground in the truest sense, because it didn't patronise, because it felt like a discovery.

The places where Wall meets building are always slightly disappointing - the architectural form, after the 1960s, is always a little too close to the Holiday Village genre for my taste, and the architects clearly haven't noticed that there's little pretty about a ruined fortress if you actually look at it, rather than have the instant ooh-look-heritage reaction. Again, what saves this is something non-architectural...

...the passage under the blocks, which leads to the main street. This is a classic Townscape approach, a refreshingly unpatrolled and unpoliced way of walking, and designing via contrasts rather than being In Keeping.

It ends at the (passenger, not container) port, and with a medieval storehouse which is now used as the Maritime Museum; there are two salient things in here, an exhibit on the Titanic (obviously) and a scale model of the port in the 1930s, a strikingly beautiful but all-but-unphotographable thing. It also has the most capricious opening hours of any museum in the UK.

But perhaps what makes this a mini-masterpiece of Townscape is the contrast with what comes after, or what goes alongside - a large area of land reclaimed in the 1930s, which is now the dispersed, low-density drosscape of the Pirelli site and its hinterland, which regular readers will be aware is a personal bete noire that need not be discussed further here.

The walls do at least provide a vantage point that would be perfect for snipers. This was, obviously, the place's original function - to aim arrows at the French marauders. Now the same could be productively perpetrated against those coming in on business from the New Forest.

Southampton is pockmarked with places where you can mourn the future - one of them is just behind the De Vere hotel. When this was constructed, the building below was demolished.

(image via Flickr user Robert R&N)

The walled city has a forgotten feeling which makes it by far the most pleasant place to walk in the city centre, the total lack of chain pubs, chain stores and marauding students and/or locals making it so pleasant you could even forget you were in Southampton. This has been a little disrupted by something called 'The French Quarter'.

I dismissed these blocks, so arrogantly bland in such a unique area, so unwilling to embrace the manifold possibilities of the fragmented and ruined context, as 'rote yuppiedromes' in BD a while ago, and a partner at John Thompson wrote in defence:

Our scheme in Southampton’s French Quarter, mentioned in your feature last week, offers truly mixed uses, mixed tenure and tenure-blind accommodation. It also supports commercial office and retail, sheltered and affordable rented accommodation, shared ownership and outright sale homes — the sale units have all sold faster than other similar developments. Rather like dropping in a missing piece of the jigsaw, it has also repaired a historic piece of Southampton’s Old Town, knitting the development back into the community — including removing a chunk of 1960s “highway engineer’s dream”, a six-lane carriageway, and replacing it with a piece of responsive urbanism. It isn’t about “starchitecture”, nor about great Corbusian-friendly slabs of flats that Cabe can get overexcited about — and which would probably be demolished in 20 years. It may not be by the Smithsons or one of the tax-dodging fancy ones, but it is architecture that works, that people want to live in, and that hopefully will still be working in 50-100 years.

You see, to me this appeared to be a straightforward, shoddy, stack-em-up cheap bit of pseudo-vernacular, with no council housing included, that was unworthy of a once-at-least-almost-great city, a design which would have been exactly the same anywhere in the UK, but apparently not. The 'partial removal' of the carriageway that they seem so proud of pales rather in comparison with the fact that, as you can see from these pictures, the area replaces the urbanism of the 60s and the 80s, both of which were sensitive here, in their very different ways, both defined by permeable spaces and civic virtues, with bland blocks hugging the street line, with the only spaces inbetween the vast surface car parks. Yet, strangely, they seem so much more pleased with themselves than were the anonymous architects of the councils and the housing associations. Funny, that.

There is one fairly interesting new thing happening here, and that's a bit of city-branding - usually something I would disdain, but here at least it reminds the place that it is somewhere - which it is prone to forget. Part of this has been through typography and road signs, which may be signs to gigantic malls and midwestern Leisure Worlds, but it's a start. And to see Priestley here is appropriate...

You can still take a ship here - this is the new QE2, complete with retro-modernist red funnel. It won't take you to New York or anywhere useful, but on a vague cruise round nowhere in particular, for an extremely large sum of money. As ever, its huge scale and confidence are deeply incongruous in this stragglescape...

The photo above is taken in the vicinity of the first high-rise to be built here for a generation, which sits at the end of the old walled town, and which you can see below. Like the old town, it's an example of good ideas badly implemented (albeit here far worse). Of course it's right and just that the port-side should have some sort of monumental presence, something that announces urbanity and arrival - and you can imagine this was enough to sway CABE, because CABE didn't have the power to just tell the developers to hire a decent architect. As a silhouette, it's fine. The fact that it's a tacky, clichéd, forgettable Blairite craphouse of a tower was outside their remit - a tower was a good idea, wasn't it? Well, yes. The response to this sort of failure should have been to have given CABE some teeth (and to have sacked around half of its leadership) but instead it goes, in the 'bonfire of the quangos'. Here are some of the things that stayed.

Criticise Thomas Heatherwick, Criticise Confucius

2010-11-01T15:10:00.003Z

Some points on the raging contradictions apparent in the Shanghai Expo and Shanghai, in CIF. More later.

owen-hatherley-ruins-great-britain

2010-10-26T18:27:00.013+01:00

So, in China I couldn't read or post on Facebook, Twitter or Blogger, nor could 'salacious' images of any kind be contemplated - but I could entirely freely read Guardian and Wikpedia articles that were fiercely critical of Chinese censorship, all of which suggests either/both that the Firewall is less bothered about what Anglophones read or that it is actually an anti-procrastination service. However, it turned out I picked a very good time to be on the other side of the globe - details on the frankly terrifying Comprehensive Spending Review and its likely consequences at K-Punk, Fantastic Journal and Rejectamentalist Manifesto. Meanwhile, there are many, many thoughts I might end up posting up here about Shanghai, and most of them will be about expressways, lighting, and the precipitous aesthetic of combined and uneven development you find out there (and the question of whether or not it is undergoing the longest and most intense imaginable version of Lenin's New Economic Policy - cf Zizek); but until then, here's a post with the usual mix of things written elsewhere and self-promotion.

A long piece for Mute on Zaha Hadid, Parametricism and Neoliberalism. As long-term readers will know, I am unexpectedly soft on Zaha, so this piece sees me attempt to justify this, while being quite clear about what it is she represents.

A short synopsis/summation of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain for the Guardian, where the URL is amusing; there's also a very nice review by Andy Beckett. Further reasons to go out and buy it this minute can be found in this review by Patrick Wright for Architecture Today, which also attributes a line to me on Calatrava which is much better than the lines I actually wrote. Further inducements at the Sunday Times, the Scotsman and the Daily Worker; and an interview at the Oxonian Review of Books, by Alex Niven.

Meanwhile, anyone who has read it, or is in any way sympathetic to its arguments, should go forthwith to World Communal Heritage, a group dedicated to preserving the public spaces of Modernist planning, from Yugoslavia to the Elephant and Castle. Like Proles for Modernism, some might think I'm making this up, but I'm not, in neither case...Extract from the World Communal Heritage Manifesto:

There are no safeguards or fences enclosing the public space! You can gather together without paying a fortune for a certain lifestyle promoted in the privatized and gentrified inner-city! The openness, porosity and communicability of Modernist social architecture and landscaping takes shape in a wealth of free space, pedestrian pathways, bridges, passages, niches, little woods and bushes, offering liberty of action to a high degree.

Not online, yet, but in All Good Newsagents: a bad-tempered review of a book on Walter Benjamin and Architecture in Radical Philosophy, and a less bad-tempered review of Ben Myers' Richard in New Humanist. An earlier review for the latter of Herve Juvin's The Coming of the Body is now online.

Finally, being born in the 80s and all, I have little to contribute to, but am avidly reading, ...And What Will Be Left Of Them?, a group blog on the 1970s set up by the Impostume's Carl Neville...whose Classless, now in (some) shops, is a spectacularly good book, perhaps the best Zero have put out - distilling a lifetime's anger into a precise evisceration of recent British film, and more unusually, an attempt to find the films which provide an alternative (Morvern Callar, the severely overlooked Orphans). Also, and irrelevantly to the book's superlative quality, the cover photo of a Cinema turned Evangelical Church in Woolwich was taken by me.

And we're off

2010-10-15T00:56:00.004+01:00

I am going to China tomorrow - Shanghai and Nanjing, specifically - for ten days, like some sort of architecture journalist. As I've never really experienced the 21st century, I don't feel quite prepared. Suggestions and such are very welcome indeed in the comments.

Meanwhile, some more bookery - an interview with Richard King for Caught by the River, where we got down to the real issues of the book, ie greasy spoon cafes and music; some other print things - in BD, possibly behind the paywall, on Chto Delat and the reconstructed Metropolis. In a sobering example of accidental architecture blog hivemind, Charles Holland has discussed very similar matters in an excellent blog post.

And not even available behind a paywall, I can also currently be found in the current issue of Frieze, mounting a kinda-sorta defence of Santiago Calatrava, being interviewed in the excellent Croatian journal Frakcija, in an issue which is, quite magnificently, mostly devoted to Orson Welles' Zagreb-shot The Trial; and reviewing Rediscovered Utopias - Saving London's Suburbs in the new issue of Icon, which makes interesting bedfellows with Will Wiles' review of Dressing for Pleasure; from which the image above comes.

Reviews and Appearances

2010-10-11T12:27:00.003+01:00

This week I can be found in public, attempting to discover What The Contemporary City Is Made Of at London Metropolitan University's lecture series Rip It Up And Start Again, at 6.30, 14th October; and the day before, I'll introducing a free screening of Dziga Vertov's monstrous, magnificent Enthusiasm - Symphony of the Donbas at the ICA, at 8.45 on the 13th October.

Also, here's two more reviews of New Ruins - from the RIBA Journal, and the Sesquipedalist. Moreover, I can be found very briefly talking about Greenwich Millennium Village on this soundtracked city-walk, led by Sinclair; and delivering a very early version of the post on HafenCity at Unlimited Liability in Hamburg.