Christmas and Architecture

Robert A. Scott in the book “The Gothic Enterprise: A guide to understanding the Medieval Cathedral” writes “We might also imagine that the long time required to build Gothic Cathedrals added to the depth of the collective identity they engendered. It almost seemed to serve their purpose that they should not be completed too quickly. It takes time for collective identity to form, develop and harden. The knowledge that Canterbury Cathedral, for example was 365 years in the making is very important part of the collective identity that has developed around it.

We are accustomed to asking how communities of people managed to build cathedrals, but we can turn the questions around and ask how cathedrals built communities. The sheer scale of the undertaking, which engaged generations of people as workers, witnesses and monitors, proponents and skeptics for periods of time measured not in decades but in centuries, strengthened existing forms of communitas and collective identity, and gave rise to new ones.”

Robert A. Scott above explores the connection between time, collective identity, and cathedral construction. The prolonged timelines of Gothic Cathedrals, like Canterbury, where 365 years were invested, contributed significantly to the depth of the collective identity surrounding them. Scott suggests that the deliberate pace of construction allowed for the gradual formation, development, and solidification of collective identity.

Shifting perspective, we contemplate not only how communities built cathedrals but also how cathedrals, through their monumental scale and multi-generational engagement, played a pivotal role in shaping and reinforcing existing forms of communities. 

The enduring construction site of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona exemplifies this evolution, where the Cathedral continues to be constructed through technological advancements afforded by passage of time.

The 2019 Notre Dame fire served as a contemporary example, revealing how the restoration efforts galvanized a global community. The swift mobilisation of funds, the involvement of over 1000 workers, and the use of centuries-old oak trees from across France underscored the enduring relationship between buildings and the communities they symbolise.

This dynamic interplay between communities and structures extends beyond cathedrals to encompass various religious and institutional buildings worldwide. The lesson for modern designers and patrons aspiring to create transformative urban spaces or “symbols of excellence” is clear: time is indispensable. The rush to achieve ambitious goals devoid of temporal investment risks rendering projects mere follies, devoid of the profound impact that the passage of time can bestow.

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In cities where initiative to construct the city resides in the private sector, density is directly linked to wealth creation and profitability. The profession of built environment is expected to work with the brief. An architect or planner may be able to inform or influence the brief but always within limitation, and in most instances where professionals have been reduced to mere service providers (voluntarily or systemic), it is natural that they adopt ¥€$ is MORE and MORE is a resounding ¥€$ motto, in the interest of private capital that employs them.

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In most instances the community, group, work culture being subjected to Gentrification as a force through redevelopment or regeneration, seem to lie in this grey zone where they are very real presence as people with lives and livelihoods connected to a place, but immediately rendered illegal or redundant through the logic of the Market. 

In many instances, the Planning process will not only cynically disregard them as inevitable collateral damage but also through Community Engagement, re-frame their opinions and feedback as validation of the regeneration plans.

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Larry the cat, speaks.
“By revisiting the past, Public Works spells out a future. “An alternate mode of practice, where architecture is in the service of civic society” was the text on the wall for OMA’s contribution titled Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servant, to David Chipperfield’s Venice Biennale Common Grounds.
Reiner de Graaf in Four Walls and a Roof states “at its (Greater London Council GLC) height in 1960s, the department had a staff of over 3000, with public buildings that carry its signature include works as diverse as Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Michael Faraday Memorial. Even today, the built legacy looks refreshingly modern and innovative”.

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for those unfamiliar with Larry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_(cat)
or Westferry Printworks, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05

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The process of gentrification is a process by which people, communities, workers get pushed to the margins of the city. The extents of these margins too undergoes changes through infrastructure, where areas once considered affordable through combination of policy and infrastructure become accessible for global speculation of land, thereby compelling displaced citizens to once again move to newer margins. 

This process of displacement is not only restricted to people but also landuses. Past 4 decades of liberalisation, has made the urban land increasingly expensive, making provision of open space, social infrastructure, markets, university campuses, student housing etc extremely challenging. Encouraging a concerted effort towards moving these landuses to new peripheries under the rational of math needs to add up, decongesting the city centre, creating new opportunities elsewhere...a series of arguments that present the act of relinquishing the right to exist in the city centre as a combination of market driven inevitability and ofcourse prospects of future opportunities when these margins will become new accessible centres.

Billingsgate Market and its move within a span of 40 years sits within this context.

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From UCL Archives, George Orwell's conviction for disorderly behaviour during his time at the Fish market. An interesting as well as encouraging coincidence that George Orwell would find his way into my narrative of Billingsgate market, few cats and Canary Wharf.

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Unlike other nations where one can see strays (cats and dogs), in UK they are chipped and are considered property by law. So stray cats or dogs do not exist in the UK. I found this aspect of legality of domestication where Life itself comes under the broad classification of being property quite interesting. So like poetry or a beautiful Wes Anderson film it does take a leap of faith to relinquish the logic of a our immediate banal context (of positive intentions) and imagine a group of feral cats living in Billingsgate Market away from human gaze.

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An article from the Guardian, about 12 years old, when the policies of Porters working in Billingsgate Market and their licensing was undergoing changes.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/aug/03/billingsgate-fish-market-porters-licences
explains the redundancy that was implied was not because the Market no longer had demand / need for the Porters' labour but instead there was an interest to liberalise the trade through stopping the licensing and allowing the Fish mongers to hire labour from the open market.

Photography artist Claudia Leisinger has covered the last porters of Billingsgate Market very beautifully in a photo essay last seen here https://vimeo.com/40644907

This trend is repeated over and over again across various sectors of the economy, from Black Cab drivers to NHS workers, where workers with skills are gentrified from their work, place of work and places where they live.

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A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift is a work of satire that captures the idea of paradoxical and ludicrous ideas represented as objective and rational, using data and  technocratic processes within a constructed inevitability of “how the world works”.

For me it captures very precisely the army of planners, advocacy experts, community participation experts and rest of paraphernalia of positive intentions, each highly specialized than the other presenting "solutions" that sit comfortably within the status quo of liberal free market...where issues of access to resources, universal access to housing, healthcare, well being are all sacrificed or ignored in the interest of "numbers need to add up". This precisely is the starting argument that Swift puts in Modest Proposal to conclude with a solution of the poor selling their children as food for the wealthy.

Quite paradoxically, the antithesis of Modernist top down hero architect (who had a socialist manifesto and composition to their merit) is a circus of Jane Jacobian Post Modernists working within exactly the same top down structure (but now without composition or a single manifesto). Bravo.

Nice quote on History

Eric Hobsbawm in his book Age of Capital quotes Pierre Nora as having written “Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware if its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives. History is always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”

Given the current times we live in, with ever increasing polarised world, with events and the past constantly being reconceptualised, one would assume studying history becomes ever more important, but we all know, there are very few professional historians and even lesser poets. World in state of global amnesia.

Nice quote / gloomy thoughts.

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Past 4 decades of liberalisation has led us to where we are, privatised water supply sector that is dumping sewage in waterways, privatised energy providers profiteering from energy crisis, a liberalised housing market that has amplified the housing affordability and access crisis, a privatised railway network that prioritises dividends over investments, an NHS that is slowly being privatised through underfunding of the public component, a private postal service, a privatised educational sector that further increases disparity and polarisation. 

Is this conversation within the scope of an architect / planners / sustainability expert? We write long reports on textures, colours, placemaking..."happiness" even and yet we skirt the very foundations that exert direct influence on our lives.

An article on Canary Wharf and the tax break it received from the state.

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Tower top study and trailing thoughts

 

What if top two sought after floors for Penthouses spread through, not two but 13-14 floors creating additional value through multiple duplex-penthouse like conditions. Is there a possibility to illustrate creation of greater value through eroding the top of a high end residential tower on prime city land?

A study I am doing while in Athens (Greece) surrounded by Athenian Polykatoikias that seem to rather nonchalantly provide much needed semi public open spaces in the form of terraces for predominant housing units in the city. A good book for reading up on these is The Public Private House: Modern Athens and its Polykatoikia by Dr Richard Woditsch. Some preview images in here.
What is interesting is Athens celebrates and appreciates terraces as an architectural element integrated within its urbanity while other cities have moved away from provision of terraces or balconies for their citizens and thereby leading to its value as a luxury add on (penthouse flats).
The terrace or the balcony works as a transitionary zone, neither completely public nor private it allows for a degree of openness towards the street frontage facilitating passive surveillance and safer streets, animates the façade and street section (vs brick clad "dignified" monoliths of London's new built developments), facilitates micro-climate through planting and thereby temperature variations, allows for distributing accessible per capita open space. What is most endearing is this element of architecture is not exclusive or luxury, it is available for most of the citizens who live in Athens.

There is value in this architectural element especially in post pandemic times, so as a design professional always ask why no terraces and balconies? Why could there be terraces during council estates or when they built the Barbican in London and not now? How did Charles Correa manage to give terraces in Mumbai to LIC residents and now they aren't possible despite the boom in real estate? and if someone responds the math doesn't add up...keep calm and carry on, but aware you are in less generous city.

Something about exclusivity of architectural elements by class that is rather pissing off, imagine if access to lifts were based on being wealthy and the rest had to take the stairs? or if there was segregation of toilets by class? because the math for providing everyone a higher spec did not add up? wouldn't that be outrageous?

Sustainability and Resilience

The IPCC's "Final Warning" on Climate Change...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/20/ipcc-climate-crisis-report-delivers-final-warning-on-15c

...is possibly going to increase the frequency with which Sustainability and Resilience get used in meetings, something I am bracing myself for.

My friend Raffa often says, the road to hell is paved with best intentions. Like the movie "Don’t look Up" there is an impending catastrophe that we can see but the only opportunity of expression that our professions (so finely tuned to existing economic structure) affords is that of paper pushing bureaucrats. Every point of urgency captured into yet another aspect of the built environment to be quantified from embodied carbon to number of plastic bags a farmer in rural Vietnam uses...or Advocacy of small tweaks to planning policy, small enough to not threaten status quo but big enough for all round chest bumps on small change - big wins pretenses.

Meanwhile:

World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam
Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions
Historical climate emissions reveal responsibility of big polluting nations
Super-rich’s carbon investment emissions ‘equivalent to whole of France
more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless 
Urban water crises driven by elites’ unsustainable consumption

Private jet sales likely to reach highest ever level this year

Limiting demand of richest 20% saves seven times greenhouse gases required to meet needs of poorest 20%, researchers find

This illustrates Climate and Sustainability aren't Technocratic issues they are political and tied to access and redistribution of resources. If we have to be constructive and start somewhere, it is within Politics + Economy.

Update // received "watching my paper straw dissolve in my coffee while..." meme today that captures my post rather well.

Liberty & Free Time

Years ago, when someone 6-8 years senior to me had returned from his Masters and started working, I had naively asked him what his plans were. Almost hoping to hear some grand plan that would guide me and my understanding of my own future prospects. Instead he said “currently I am just busy trying to manage everyday logistics of existing”. It was a short response but honest. The memory of that question and its response does surface frequently as I too like many before and after get busy within my preoccupations of everyday existence.

On a completely disconnected note I found this:

https://amp.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/apr/10/we-got-a-kick-out-of-it-art-forgers-reveal-secrets-of-paintings-that-fooled-experts

The last paragraph reads “Asked what most surprised her about the couple, Fischer said: “That they bought liberty and free time with the money they organised for themselves through the scam. No Ferrari, no Prada dresses, but free space to go to museums, to look after the children, to pursue their passion for research.”

Restaurant Reviews and Architecture

Brilliant review on NOMA’s closure by Jay Rayner, 

who seems to do something that most Architects and Planners are unable to, point to the fallacy of sustainability as being a purely technocratic process of quantification and mitigation rather than an honest political discourse.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/15/twenty-six-courses-400-bills-artichoke-creme-brulee-i-wont-miss-fine-dining

“We dream of a future in which the chef is socially engaged, conscious of and responsible for his or her contribution to a just, sustainable society,” it began, somehow failing to acknowledge that their job was making dinner for rich people. In truth, however hard you attend to your restaurant’s sustainability, it’s pointless if most of your customers are flying business class to get there or travelling in chauffeured limos from Manhattan because those are the only ones who can afford it. The carbon footprint of the people you attract becomes part of the carbon footprint of your business.

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Reiner de Graaf writing in Dezeen marking the launch of his third book

https://www.dezeen.com/2023/02/28/reinier-de-graaf-architecture-buzzwords-archispeak-opinion/

Both disconnected individuals, one is restaurant reviewer and food critic, other an architect / partner in a global commercial practise...embedded within the current state of affairs, so definitely not outliers...yet they capture a common strand.

Advocacy, the convoluted bureaucracy of quantification and absolute mind numbing cacophony of positive intentions...serving only one purpose, obfuscation and social condensation...a pressure release valve.

The hypocrisy of it all.