Time for some more photos photoed in and from the top of the Tate Modern Extension, photoed August 30th 2016:
The one in the middle, no 5, shows that I wasn’t the only one interested in reflections.
I’ll know that my life is back on track, if it ever does get back on track, when I can again go to this superb place.
Meanwhile, I continue to tell myself this, which I photoed more recently in the same superb place.
In 1984, I was one of many who helped organise a big Libertarian Conference at Royal Holloway College. US libertarian Jim Turney was one of those who attended, and he took these photos, which he has just emailed to me:
Left to right there: the late Chris R. Tame (who was the super-organiser of this gathering); me; Peter Breggin.
Left to right: John Hospers; me again; a guy who wrote and writes regularly for the IEA, and whom I know well but whose name is locked in a getting-old brain cave (anyone?); Nigel Ashford.
Left to right: Hospers again; me again; the guy I know well but … again; Ashford again; and a guy I genuinely do not know after all these years. Sorry if it turns out I should know him. Anyone?
Turney picked out the photos he had of this event with me in them, and there I am, the thin geek in the glasses. You can tell he’s a politician, can’t you? I can’t be the only person whom he has photoed during those long ago times when only Real Photographers had cameras and the half dozen digital cameras in existence all belonged to NASA. Think how precious such photos might be to some people, compared to photos photoed more recently.
I will now email Jim Turney back, thanking him for these remarkable photos, and asking if he has any more of this event, and in particular any more of Chris Tame.
Today I staggered out to do some shopping. Well, to be more exact I walked out, but then staggered back. Whatever. Anyway, during the walking bit, I photoed just one photo. This:
The light is dim and the focussing uncertain. (I think I should start photoing more photos with my mobile phone.) But you will get my point, once I get around to making it.
My point being: That’s a petrol station in Vauxhall Bridge Road, just before I get to my shops. And above it and right next to it, people live.
Would you want to live above a petrol station? I don’t think I would.
I grumble here from time to time about health and safety, but only in a world where health and safety trumps everything else would a building such this one seem routine. Irony alert: “Health and safety” means that there are now huge risks that we are willing to undergo now, which we were not before.
Imagine living in such a place during the Blitz. Not that I suppose for one moment that anyone ever did.
It is the sundrenched late afternoon of April 21st 2009, and they’re busy building something:
What I’m getting at with the above imagery is:
(1) This is a construction site, and these people clearly know what they are doing. Constructions almost always turn out exactly as planned.
And:
(2) Look at the state of it!!!
I recognise various individual bits of tech there, like the reinforcing rod tubes, and that big blue propeller for digging holes, to put such things as reinforcing rod tubes in. But all that stuff jammed together in a confined space like that? It looks like someone’s attic for goodness sake.
Yet, it was from this outdoor attic that there duly emerged … the Shard.
Being so restricted in my movements just now has got me pondering the view from my kitchen window. It doesn’t change from day to day, or now, from year to year. But, oh, there was a time, a time when it would change from hour to hour:
Those were photoed between October 2015 and February 2016. I show some because they show what was going on. and others for artistic effect. You decide which is which. What they were doing was converting the building opposite it something different and taller, in which more living and working could happen than before.
The one that got me interested in these photos was the silhouette of the guy with the machine. But now, the ones I like best feature the reinforced concrete being destroyed. I love that effect.
The netting that you see in some of these photos is to stop pigeons crapping in the courtyard. It didn’t help with the focussing, but it does create an effect.
Memo to self: Dig up the old posting where a crane unfolded itself in this very spot.
Interesting Twitter thread by Chris Herd about remote working:
I’ve spoken to 1,500+ people about remote work in the last 9 months
A few predictions of what is likely to emerge before 2030
I’ll believe it all as and when I see it. I will continue to believe that personal meet-ups still count for a lot, and get a lot of information communicated. Historically, this is why cities exist. Suburbs have long existed. I suspect Herd is describing a new sort of suburb, but not the end of the urb.
Clearly, a lot of people want to make this stuff work.
My architecture email feeds are telling me that new building in London, and most definitely new office building in London, has stopped dead. It’s all house conversions and trivia about would-be luxury shops.
Meanwhile, if the above quoted bits are anything to go by, the war against the full stop continues
For me, a complicated day. What spare time I had was spent paying attention to sport, basically to take my mind off all the complications.
So, here’s an illuminated cement mixer, which I photoed outside the Royal Festival Hall way back in 2007:
Art, I assume. But so long ago that I could not persuade the internet to tell me about it. Plenty of cement mixers and plenty of RFH scenes, but no sign of this particular combination of both.
2007 was way before I had a camera that truly suited me. That was still five years away. But these photos came out pretty well, I think. It helped that they were photoed at just the moment when daylight was about half gone, which allowed the artificial green light to make its presence felt but not to be the whole story.
Another notable James Cook photo of his local and favourite cathedral:
It’s nice how the sheep are mostly looking, vaguely curious but in no way troubled, at the camera.
And note how, in the summer, with all those leaves, the tree in the middle would spoil everything.
Fake Ancient is my rather sarky description of architecture that looks like it was designed a whole lot longer ago than it really was. But at its best it can be very impressive, and this evening I channel hopped my way into a television show (episode 9 of those 10) about a certain John Simpson, who seems like he knows all about how to do this style, although I only caught the end of it. A new name to me. He shouldn’t have been, but he was.
From that, straight to the John Simpson Architects website, and immediately a rather surprising discovery. John Simpson Architects are the people who have been redesigning the Royal College of Music, which is where GodDaughter2 has for the last few years been learning about how to sing. Throughout that time, finding my way through the college to wherever she and I were meeting, or to where she was performing, was like some sort of Ancient Greek myth involving a Labyrinth, the Underworld, and frightful punishments like Eternal Damnation if you got lost.
With luck GodDaughter2 will retain her right to take me to the RCM, and enable me to see all the new reshaping that’s been going on once it’s well and truly finished. What I’ve seen of it, of what has been finished, has looked very nice, but I never thought to wonder who had designed it all.
I think this is because this traditional style, to be more polite about it, of doing architecture, and especially when it is done as well as it is being done at the RCM, doesn’t give off that sense of an individual architect, imposing his wilful whim upon everything, in a way that would have been totally different if a different architect had been let loose on the place. Traditional architecture is, in other words, the opposite of Starchitecture. That being the point of tradition. It looks roughly the same, no matter who is doing it, because “doing it” means following it. So, although I wish I had been more curious about who was doing what at the RCM, I wasn’t. It just was happening, seemingly of its own accord.
But now I do know who’s been doing the designing, and I’m very glad to have learned this.
Judging by his performances on the telly that I did catch, John Simpson still seems to have plenty of active life left in him, which is very good news. And there was me thinking that this kind of thing might be dying the death whenever Quinlan Terry dies his death.
Nowadays, cameras can tell you exactly where you were when you took a photo, as well as exactly when you took it. But I can’t be doing with all that. I prefer taking photos like this one as I do my out-and-abouting, that say, as this one does, “You Are Here”:
And that one says it in French. Excellent.
We’re in the Pompidou Centre in Paris, in the bitterly cold February of 2012. Even remembering how cold that visit was makes me shudder now. But the Pompidou Centre itself was warm enough, and the views in it and from it were most diverting.
I have quite a few Paris postings here now, but have yet to transfer any of the postings from the old blog that I did about that earlier 2012 trip . My favourite, from a more recent and much warmer visit, featured my all time favourite food photo.