Category: Architecture

Out east in 2012

I haven’t been getting out much lately, so am instead exploring my photo-archives.

These from March 24th 2012, when I journeyed (and not for the first time) out east to the Victoria Docks, in the vicinity of the then-under-construction Emirates Air-Line, which is that strange ski lift that goes across the River:

As you can see, I especially like the cranes. And the barbed wire. There were even pylons to be seen. Best of all is that newish (-ish now) footbridge.

I used to love that place, and especially then, with all manner of new stuff going on. Memo to self: go back and see how things there have changed. Because, they have surely changed quite a lot.

And this could be the biggest change of the lot. Apparently, spurred on by TikTok, people have recently been riding on the ski lift in large numbers. There’s a first.

22 dwarfs 42 (again)

Regular BMNB commenter Alastair James, noting my growing liking for 22 Bishopsgate, just sent me this photo, taken by him from Finsbury Circus:

That’s 22 Bishopsgate looming up behind Tower 42, the NatWest Tower that was.

It so happens I photoed this same Big Thing Alignment from pretty much the exact same direction, back in 2018, when 22 Bishopsgate was still being built:

Finsbury Circus is nearer to these Big Things than where I was when I photoed the above.

If you photo a Big Thing behind a not so big thing, the paradoxical effect can be that the Big Thing actually looks smaller, the nearer you are to it, because even a quite small thing makes its presence felt if it is in the foreground. Get away into the distance, and the bigness of the Big Thing becomes a lot clearer.

This effect is not particularly clear in the above photos, despite the difference in distance. But I did a posting on Samizdata, in which a church totally hides the Big Thing behind it. And that Big Thing was: The Shard.

When taxation is defenestration

Daylight robbery, …

… via Mick Hartley, to whom thanks.

For this guy, only the window tax is “daylight robbery”, because that’s the only tax he can photograph.

Whereas, for this guy …

The age of colourful architecture is getting nearer every day but will still take quite a while to arrive

There’s another street furniture competition going on, in London so I got an email about it. Follow that link, and you will find photos of the shortlisted ones. Here are six of those photos:

You know, if you are any sort of regular here, what I am now going to say about these.

Colour.

Architects only get to do big buildings when they are about sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety. Until then, they get fobbed off, and that’s if they’re lucky, with jobs like designing street furniture. This is because the people who decide who does big buildings are themselves so very, very old.

Now, look at these photos again, and imagine all the children in the photos thirty years older, and doing big noticeable buildings.

It will be a different world.

And as I have recently already said and will now say again, lots of people will hate the new style and suddenly become nostalgic for the dreary rubbish we all have to put up with now.

Architects are soon going to get over their obsession with black, white, brown and grey, and generally pale and lifeless shades of boring … and start doing proper colour on the outside of their now boring buildings, big time. This is a stylistic pulse that I do happen to have my finger on, … and I know whereof I speak. And it can’t come too soon, I say.

Well, when I wrote that I was feeling impatient. My message today is: it’ll happen, but I’ll have to wait a while. The kids doing this are still only kids. As in: around thirty. But give it another thirty years …

Quota gallery of Broadway progress

As foreseen yesterday, today was indeed, although well worth the strain, … strenuous. And I am now determined to keep this posting short, unlike last night’s exhausted ramble.

In among yesterday’s sunshine and strenuosity, I photoed these photos, of progress on the Broadway:

They’ll be posh flats, basically. I seem to recall recently wondering if this project would ever make a profit. Well, another photo I photoed yesterday was this, which has a bearing on that matter:

Although, that could just be inflation happening before anyone official is prepared to talk about it already being on that sort of scary scale. But, even if inflation is now surging, the fact that house prices are also surging suggests that houses, or in this case flats, are at least keeping their value.

These new places will not be to all tastes, because new buildings seldom are. But I think I’m going to rather like them. Apart from down at ground level, where all new modernist buildings are invariably dull and unwelcoming, on account of modernists not knowing how to do front doors, but refusing to do them anciently, which would cheer things up no end. But like I say, they refuse to do that.

And that’s your lot for today. I’m off to bed now.

Duck & Waffle views yesterday

Yesterday’s Duck & Waffle socialising was with, get this, GodDaughter1 and GodDaughter2, These two favourite people of mine had, until yesterday, only met very fleetingly during parties or events at my home, and never properly connected. Yesterday, they got to really talk. And it says everything about what mattered to me about this meetup, and what didn’t, that I actually forgot to bring my regular camera with me, and had to make do with my mobile, which I had with me not to photo but to ensure that we all met up successfully. Which to cut a long and boring story down to its proper size, … we did.

Even more remarkably, I really wasn’t more than mildly bothered to have forgotten the proper camera, because I reckoned the mobile would be okay for my purposes, and I reckon it was. Here, as not promised yesterday evening, are my favourite photos from yesterday, of favourite place of mine, London, as seen from above:

These views could only be photoed through plate glass, so there were many reflections getting in the way. But, you get the pictures. Roof clutter heaven. There were some clouds in the sky (see photo 1), unlike on Saturday, but these were few and small.

The background noise in the place was louder than I’d have liked. It meant I had to shout a bit, and that now makes me cough. On the other hand, we probably had the best table in the house from the views point of view, looking out west, north and east, from its spot on in the far left corner of the floor. Plus, there was a bar which we later visited which had windows looking south, to other nearby Big Things, most notably the Gherkin, but also the top of 22 Bishopsgate, the D&W being at the top of 110 Bishopsgate.

Both these Bishopsgate towers are so bland that they neither of them, to my knowledge, have yet been awarded nicknames. But, 22 Bishopsgate. which is the biggest City of London Big Thing by quite a way, is growing on me. The view of it from the main exit of Liverpool Street Station is very fine, especially in the slightly misty sunshine that prevailed yesterday.

The Tower of London, to be seen in photo 8 above, the one with the Gherkin dominating the foreground, used once upon a time to be the biggest Big Thing in London. Now look at it. Tiny. Tiny even compared to Tower Bridge, let along all the other bigger Things.

And for me, another highlight is the way that the BT Tower stands out west, in photo 6, in isolated splendour. Isolated, I presume, because nothing is allowed to get in the way of all the signals it sends out and receives.

Today I ate ice cream with a knife and fork

More socialising today. Returned home exhausted and had a sleep. With luck, fuller report with photos follows, although nothing promised. For now, this ice cream photo must suff-ice:

This was in something called the Duck & Waffle, which is way up at the top of a City of London Big Thing. I had ice cream and waffle, the waffle being the reason for the knife and fork. But this worked well for the ice cream also.

A spoon was also provided, and I did use this right at the end after the ice cream, which had begun very cold and solid, had melted.

Castelnou

Castelnou is a small and impossibly picturesque hill town in the lower reaches of the Pyrenees, in the far south of France. GodDaughter2’s parents and I went by car, just over five years ago now, in May 2016, to check it out. And yes, the weather was as marvellous in Castelnou as it has recently been unmarvellous in London.

Nowadays, I find that my expeditions have as their officially designated destination a spot where I have arranged to meet up with a friend and exchange chat, rather than just a particular physical place I especially want to check out. But as my death approaches, not as fast as I feared it would last Christmas but still faster than I had previously supposed that it would, I find that mere Things, in London or anywhere else, aren’t enough to make me get out of the house at the time previously determined. Partly this is because if I fail to arrive at the Thing at the planned time, the Thing won’t ring me up and ask me where I got to, whereas people are inclined to do just that. And partly because the Internet tells you lots about Things, whereas actually meeting people bestows knowledge and pleasures more profound and subtle than you could obtain by any other communicational means.

The point of this Castelnou expedition was that it was with GodDaughter2’s parents, not that it was to Castelnou. Castelnou was just an excuse for us all to spend time with each other, plus it gave us things to talk about.

But of course, once in Castelnou, I photoed photos galore, of which these are just a few:

A few more things to say.

First, there are cats and dogs involved (as well as a bird statue), hence this posting appearing here on a Friday. The cats were very friendly and sociable. The dogs were more cautiously proprietorial, but none were aggressive. Which I think reflects well on us tourists. We all behave well towards these creatures, and they behaved towards us accordingly.

Second, what’s wrong with being a tourist? I am sure that “tourists” have been featured on the popular TV show Room 101. But if I was ever on Room 101 I would want to banish from the world “tourists who complain about all the other tourists”. Tourism is a fine thing, enjoyable for those of us who do it or we wouldn’t keep doing it, and profitable for those who cater to our needs. Many good things happen because of us tourists. Besides all the deserving people who get to earn a living from it, there are the conversations that tourists have with the locals whom they encounter, and with each other, which can sometimes have have wonderfully creative consequences. Many an economic success story has started with a conversation involving tourists. Tourists bring the world, as it were, to particular places, and places into contact with other places, and thereby are able to provoke creative thoughts that would otherwise not have occurred to anyone.

Does tourism “spoil” places like Castelnou? Hardly. I’ll bet you Castelnou is a much happier, prettier and more interesting place than it was before it started attracting tourists.

And finally, Castelnou is a fine example of an aesthetic process that fascinates me more and more, which is the way that when an architectural style first erupts, it is hated, but then when it settles back into being only a few surviving ruins, people find that same style, to quote my own words in the first sentence of this posting, impossibly picturesque. Castelnou began as a castle, which then gathered dwellings around it. And you can bet that the people in the vicinity of this castle hated it and feared it, that being the whole idea. But once the castles stopped being built in such numbers and when the castles that survived began turning into ruins, they then also turned into objects of affection, first for locals, and then, even more, for visitors from many miles away.

Tangenting somewhat, I was yesterday predicting that the next wave of architectural fashion is going to be a lot more colourful. And it is. But, lots of people will, for as long as this new fashion lasts and seems to be on the march (the military metaphor is deliberate), hate that fashion, and regret the passing of the drearily monochromatic tedium that they now only grumble about (because that is now still on the march).

Is Castelnou perchance the French, or maybe the Catalan, for Newcastle? Sounds like it to me.

APEROL brightens up Bankside

When I met up with GodDaughter2 last week at the Blue Fin Building I got there a bit early and had some time to kill. Which of course I did by photoing, one of the photos I photoed being this:

What appealed to me was how over-the-top colourful this fake-floral display was, so far over-the-top that it quite triumphed over the unseasonal and deeply gloomy weather that day. (Today has been a bit better, or at least a bit warmer.)

But what, I wondered, is “APEROL”? At first I thought APEROL was the name of the indoor place behind this display. Turns out APEROL is a drink, which has been putting itself about lately, and that the above sign was because APEROL was sponsoring a pop-up, whatever exactly that may be. See categories list below, which I now realise must include “Getting old”. No doubt someone can – and perhaps even will – explain. I’m guessing it’s an outdoor eatery or drinkery of some sort which isn’t so much built, but rather simply assembled in a hitherto public spot big enough to accommodate it, made into a trend by Lockdown. If that’s right then I assume that money changed hands, in the direction of the local authority concerned.

Fine by me. The architecture surrounding this sign (we’re a place that calls itself “Bankside”), is, especially at street level, as modernistically dreary as you could ever hope not to see, and anything that brightens up the area, like a piece of colourful product placement, is to be welcomed. It certainly cheered me up.

Architects are soon going to get over their obsession with black, white, brown and grey, and generally pale and lifeless shades of boring – even the Blue Fin Building isn’t properly blue – and start doing proper colour on the outside of their now boring buildings, big time. This is a stylistic pulse that I do happen to have my finger on, unlike the pop-up thing, and I know whereof I speak. And it can’t come too soon, I say.

Also, to fly off at something of a tangent, expect people to start saying that they’re starting to like Nova, instead of everyone just carbuncling on about how trashy they think it looks. At least that adds a bit of real colour to the London skyline.

I miss proper light bulbs

One from the I Just Like It directory:

March 2019. A sure sign of a true Big Thing is that you recognise it even when it’s out of focus. Well, even if you don’t, I do. Plus, is that a photoer on the bridge there? Maybe it’s just two people.

Now the above photo just makes me angry about how lightbulbs have degenerated into these bullshit bulbs that look pretty, but don’t give off enough effing light. Why didn’t I buy a lifetime’s supply of the old ones, that worked properly, when I had the chance?