Design – Page 9 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Concerning the inexorable tendency of modern architecture to be boring

When you own a building, you don’t want it owning you. You want the building to serve your purposes. You don’t want to be reduced to its mere caretaker, while it stubbornly refuses to serve your purposes.

Consider that graph, the one concerning the moment when humanity went from a fixed and static world, to a dynamically improving world. At that moment in history, a building became something different from what it had been. It used to be something permanent. The longer it lasted, the better. As its owner, you wanted to keep it working, to keep it as it is, rather than allowing it to crumble. In such a world, the better and more solidly the building was built in the first place, the better. Its purpose would last for ever.

But in the new dynamic world, the world after The Kink, buildings become something you, or whoever then owns your building, might one day be wanting to replace with something bigger, taller, better, more efficient, more productive, built with technology that does not now exist and can hardly even be imagined. This is especially true in cities, the places where the new dynamism of the world is most in evidence.

So, when you build a big new building in a city, the one thing you really do not need is a world that one day decides that you or whoever you sell it to must, from now on, become the curator of this building, a building which neither you nor anybody who ever owns it may at any time in the future destroy, and replace with something bigger and more profitable.

In Britain now, this dreaded arrangement is formalised in the form of the Preservation Order. When one of these things descends upon your building, that building ceases to be replaceable. It ceases to be a means to achieve dynamism, and becomes a potential barrier to it. But the same thing can happen more informally. If The People want you not to destroy the building you thought you owned, they are awfully liable to get their way, whatever they may or may not have said in the past.

You may be saying: Oh come on, that’ll not happen for decades. Meanwhile, you can get plenty of use out of your new place. The trouble is that future usefulness, future cost-to-benefit ratio feeds back into the price now. Even the most short-termist owner must still consider what future owners will or will not get from his building, even if he himself cares nothing for the future and is himself the very personification of pure greed, for lots of money, now. A Preservation Order on your newly constructed building will reduce the usefulness of the site in a century’s time, and hence its value now.

All of which means that there is a relentless tendency for builders of new urban buildings not to want them to be the sort of buildings which people in general will miss, when a later owner may want to replace it.

There is, in short, an inexorable tendency for “modern” architecture (by which I simply mean all architecture since The Kink in that graph) to be ugly, by which I simply mean what is widely considered to be ugly.

There are lots of other reasons, aside from the above reason, why “progress”, “modernity”, and so on, are often so disagreeable to contemplate. And I still think that The Kink was and is a wonderful thing, from which much beauty of other sorts has resulted. But progress and modernity are not as pretty to look at as many of us might like, and I think that what I’ve said in this posting goes some way to explaining why.

LATER: As soon as you publish something, you then see it with new eyes (the eyes of potential readers), and what I now see is that the word “ugly” is perhaps wrong. What I mean is something more like “nothing”. Not ugly as in actively repulsive. Just “meh”, as I’ve never said before myself, but as I’ve heard lots of others say. Buildings that communicate not anti-beauty, more like non-beauty. The point is, if you want to knock a building down, you want people not to feel they might miss it. You want them to feel, basically, nothing. Oh, they’re knocking down that building, you know, the one, that one next to the … blah blah mumble mumble. Oh, that. Oh well. If someone thinks a building is ugly, chances are someone else will like it, and before you know it, politics is happening. That, you don’t want.

LATER: I didn’t want people coming here to be told that modern architecture is ugly, so I changed the “ugly” in the title to “boring”, which is nearer my mark.

Taxis-with-adverts photoed five years ago

For quite a while now, I have been curious as to when my habit of photoing taxis-with-adverts kicked in. I’m still not sure, but by August 2015 (August 15th 2015 to be exact) this habit had evidently become well established, because on that one day, I photoed all of these photos:

Why do I like such taxis? Why do I like photoing them? And why do I like displaying arrays of such photos here at my blog? Similar, yet different. Identical shapes, but highly variable decor. I’m sure there must be some sort of psychological test that could be inflicted upon me, basically one for identifying nutters (“people with mental health issues” seems to be the latest iteration of such parlance), in which I would score heavily enough to cause a bit of concern, more so than if most of you mere readers of BMNB were made to take such a test.

Regular commenter here Alastair said of an earlier such taxis-with-adverts array that some sort of art might be contrived with these photos. My first reaction when I read that was that this was merely a polite way of saying what I just said in my previous paragraph, given what art often is these days. But Alastair had something political in mind, concerning how privileged and capitalistic these taxis are, in whom they serve and in what they advertise.

But my interest in taxis with adverts is aesthetic. I simply like how they look. Out there in the streets of London, and in my photos.

Purple pavement passage

Which sounds like a description of a particularly florid piece of writing about a pavement, but actually I’m talking about this:

Passages like that one are one of the oddities of modern urban life. They happen when a rather posh building is being erected right next to a narrow pavement, over which they want to get some serious work done, but beneath which they do not want to antagonise potential customers and word-of-mouthers thinking about and talking about the people doing the building, thereby threatening the subsequent selling of the apartments or offices in the building, when it’s finished. If the developers mess with the lives of passers-by while they’re building, that at least suggests that they might have a similarly casual attitude to their actual customers. There is so much money at stake here, so big a gap between feast or famine for the developers, that a bit of extra bother at ground level, just next to the site, is well worth going to. Factor in the recent intensification of health-and-safety, and the desire by developers to avoid damaging fights with local bureaucrats, and you have yourself an entire new urban form, the scaffolded pavement passage.

In this particular one, which is in Victoria Street next to and beneath The Broadway, the shininess of the cladding on the inside and the colourful lighting combine to striking effect. We’re looking south east towards Parliament Square. The right hand photo is basically a close-up of the middle of the left hand photo.

I took these photos yesterday afternoon. As with so much that happens in cities these day, if you don’t like it, you needn’t fret. It’ll soon be gone.

Taxi with sealant and construction adhesive advert

I continue to keep an eye out for taxis with adverts. But, taxis are a lot less busy at present, because of You Know What, and their adverts now reach far fewer people.

But, the above observations may be because I, although not myself overwhelmingly affluent, live in a rather affluent part of London. The rich are getting out a lot less these days. But in less posh parts of town, life is much more like normal because it damn well has to be, aside from all the face masks. Taxis are busier, and adverts on them count for more, than either now do in central London.

So it was that I recently spotted this fine example of the species, outside Finsbury Park Tube:

One of the trends in advertising nowadays is that, because people can now easily do no-extra-cost photoing of adverts and read them at their leisure, it therefore makes sense for at least some adverts to be far wordier and more information-packed. There is a definite whiff of that about this advert, I think.

Watch the video here. “The snag list eliminator is here to stay.”

The adverts to which Google will now subject me are about to get very weird.

The Broadgate Tower … etcetera

The Broadgate Tower, because I like it. This particular City of London Big Thing is in a slightly different style to the more celebrated Big Things just to its south, in that it is one of those towers that is pretending to be a little clutch of separate towers. No one of these towers is that distinctive, but together they make a pleasing aggregate. (Also, the late afternoon sun can bounce off this Thing in a way that is downright spectacular, but that’s for a different posting.)

The “etcetera” bit of this posting is because although the Broadgate Tower was my officially designated destination for the afternoon, the weather was rather grim and as you will see, my photos of the Tower itself didn’t come out that well. Better were the close-up views of diverting things that I also photoed that day. My taxis-with-adverts habit had by then kicked in, and the adverts on taxis look pretty good whatever the state of the light is. And adverts in general were a source of photo-fun on that particular day, what with that part of town being so very different from the part where I live:

We start at whatever station that was that I went to to get started. Hoxton? Shoreditch High St? Don’t know? Didn’t take (but should have taken) a photo-note. Then we get several photos of the Broadgate Tower, and in among them, the real fun starts, in the form of the signs and adverts and other curiosities I encountered. I ended up in the City, where quite Big Things are reflected in other Bigger Things.

There’s even a bridge, of a sort that I really like, one that joins two buildings across a narrow street. It’s a double-decker bridge, which I particularly enjoy.

Today’s weather is rather grim. However, these photos were all photoed on July 27th 2015, exactly five years ago to the day. The weather was, as already stated, rather grim on that day also. But, I hope you agree that I worked around it okay.

Food and drink makes it into the categories list because of the bottle tops, which adorn a pub and which add up to a male figure, in the manner of a Gormley project. But: not. Also, one of the taxis says to just eat.

That a manufacturer of something complicated is using 3D printing to make it is not news

I get emails from Google concerning 3D printing. These emails happen daily and each contains links to many reports of 3D printing being done by this or that enterprise.

When I first learned about 3D printing, I thought it was a revolutionary technology, one that would “disrupt” all manner of processes and technologies. This was why I told Google to send me these emails. I thought that 3D printing might soon start happening in people’s homes. Because it could, basically. But homes don’t mass produce anything, except food, and 3D printed food is ridiculous. Just for starters, potentially poisonous. It makes as much sense to have a lathe in every home, to sculpt food so that it all looks like chess pieces. Every home could do that. But why would it? A few crazy lathe-using hobbyists do have lathes in their homes. With these lathes they make a few rather pointless things that they could easily buy, far better made, for a tiny fraction of the cost and fuss of having their own lathe. The rest of us, not being crazy, refrain from “domestic lathing”.

3D printing, like using a lathe, is not disruptive. It is simply a way of making things, which was developed quite a long time ago, and which even now keeps on getting better. Recently, people like me noticed 3D printing, because 3D printing makes great videos and photos For the internet. But that didn’t make it disruptive. It just meant that 3D printing was contributing to the internet, just as it also contributes to the pharmaceutical trade and the building trade and the trade of making farm equipment. Wherever stuff is being made and then assembled, there will be 3D printing going on, as part of the process.

Now that I have understood all this, these emails from Google have become rather boring and often very silly.

Consider the headline above this non-story:

XB-1 commercial supersonic jet is real and 3D printing helped make it so

Well, yes, of course it did. Why wouldn’t it? The XB-1, as I have already noted here, is, at least potentially, one hell of a story. That they used 3D printing in the course of making it is not a story. It would only have been a story if they hadn’t.

Getting out more

Today I got out more. Meaning, I got out. The plan was to take a photo, and show it here, only hours later, instead of my usual average these days of about five years.

I started by putting out the rubbish, in the yard that my kitchen window looks out over. And already I got two photos I liked, of the little urban garden someone has created down there, and from looking upwards:

Yes, also lots of bikes. Courtyards are good places to store them fairly safely.

And here are four diverting things I saw on my walking about. Some big hair, and three educational mugs with national flags, times tables, and the periodic chart of the elements:

Then I did some shopping, staggered home with far too much stuff, in particular far too many chocolate biscuits, and am now knackered.

That moment when three of the statues in Parliament Square were in boxes

For a few days in June, the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square was hidden in a box, to protect it from demonstrators.

And on June 17th, I checked it out:

I also discovered that two other statues had been thus encased.

Mandela:

And Gandhi:

Although strangely, what with him having been threatened, not Lincoln:

I especially treasure photos like this, of moments in London history that are very striking, yet temporary. (Another of my photo-clutches that I especially like having photoed for this reason is all the photos I photoed of this broken crane.)

I vividly recall photoing these statues-in-boxes photos, yet when I went looking for them this evening, I couldn’t find them on my hard disk. I eventually looked on the back-up SD card that I always carry with me in my jacket pocket for when I forget to insert the regular SD card that is usually in my camera, and there these photos were. Still on that SD card, not yet downloaded to the hard disc, yet all present and correct. And I experienced that particular happiness that happens when life extricates itself from extreme misery, and back only to the extreme imperfection that is life’s normal state.

I returned on June 21st. By which time these boxes had gone and all the statues were back on view.

Transparent plague mask

This actually looks like a pretty good idea:

I found it at This Is Wny I’m Broke, which I make a point of checking out from time to time.

The thing is, masks are annoying, one of the most annoying things about them being that we can’t see lips move when we are talking to each other. The Plague spreads best in confined spaces with prolonged social contact, which is also how a lot of chatting is done. So the temptation is to dump the mask just when it might make a real difference.