Month: March 2021

Architectural modernism: Its triumph indoors and its battle out of doors

Today I was at the Royal Marsden, having a scan in a device that looked like this:

In other words it looked like a time travel portal in a rather bad movie. That photo’s a bit blurry, but they only allowed me one go at photoing it.

But that’s not my point here. What my point is is a hobby horse of mine, namely, well, … see the title above. The way that Architectural Modernism has totally triumphed indoors …:

…, whereas, out if doors, there’s still everything to play for:

That being my cropped version of an aerial photo of the same Marsden Royal whose insides are entirely tricked out in Modernist Vernacular. I found it hanging on a wall, somewhere inside the Marsden itself. And that’s right. The outside of the Royal Marsden is not Modernist Vernacular. Anything but. It is Victorian Ancient, just as it has always been. But the inside is now entirely tricked out in Modernist Vernacular.

And that illustrates a widely observable contrast in our world, and is why so many Ancientist facades are being held up with metal frames, while behind all that, Modernist interiors are being erected.

There are lots of reasons for this contrast, but the basic reason is that Architectural Modernism works extremely well indoors, but rather less well out of doors.

Actually, that first photo does have something to do with it, as I may or may not get around to explaining, in another posting.

Beard Trimmer in the distance

Incoming from GodDaughter2:

Somewhere just downstream of Tate Modern. That kind of area.

It’s the old Big-Thing-in-the-distance-through-a-gap-in-the-buildings effect, which often happens, as here, when the gap is simply caused by a road happening to go straight towards the Big Thing in question. She knew I’d like this, because when we’ve been for walks in the past, I’ve said “Look at that! Wow!” when seeing something like this. I love the vagueness of the Big Thing bit of the image, in contrast to the definiteness of the foreground anonymity.

The official name for this particular Big Thing is Strata, but GD2 described it today on the phone, when I was thanking her for this photo, as a beard trimmer. So from now on, for me, this is going to be the Beard Trimmer.

No definite information about the camera she used, but almost certainly her mobile. Probably an iPhone.

Note also how the tree does not, because of the time of the year, wreck the view.

The trees of Vincent Square

Yesterday, I did some shopping, and on my way back turned into Vincent Square, basically just to get away from the din of Vauxhall Bridge Road.

And I saw trees, resplendent in the evening sunshine, and in their total lack of leaves to spoil the splendour:

Photo 1 shows the bigger picture, and also what my Samsung Galaxy mobile phone does to vertical lines if you let it. Basically it can’t handle wide open spaces very well. Photo 2 and I’m looking at the branches of the trees rather more closely.

Photo 3 has me flying off at a tangent and bringing back memories of the time when I used to photo all manner of things reflected in car windows.

But then, in Photo 4, we see me noticing the, to me, really strange thing about these trees, which is the way they look the way they do entirely because men with saws decided that this was how they were going to look. Once you see these weirdly shaped branches, ziggy-zagging this way and that, for no apparent reason, yet surely for good reasons, you never look at a tree the same way again. I mean, look at that branch, in the middle there. Whose idea was that? And why?

Sometimes pollarding is rather obvious, once you’ve got your head around the fact of it. But what we are seeing here is so weird, I don’t know if the word pollarding still applies.

What we are not looking at is Nature Untramelled.