Strata Outa London

I'm getting increaslingly annoyed that every Londoner is ignoring the elephant in the room. Its not like you can avoid the bastard thing, is it? It has practically view-raped every corner south of the river.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the elephant, now with three blades for a closer shave.

I am, of course, talking about the Carbuncle Award winning architectural fucking atrocity that is the Strata Tower of Elephant and Castle.

Old news, I know, but sometimes rage takes a while to bed roots and, living within spitting distance of it has certainly bed some redwood-like ones.

Lets start with the obvious flaw with its aesthetics. The building is a gargantuan body-hair groomer with a zebra striped grip. It is. It seriously is. Its so large that its practically unavoidable. 43 storeys of pure contempt for all the beautiful architecture in London. Nothing for me says that more than this particular photo.

I WILL CRUSH YOU!  http://www.flickr.com/photos/apvg/4700889238/in/photostream/

This is the architectural equivalent of photobombing. The proverbial drunk man showing his arse in an otherwise classy picture of you and you girlfirend on holiday. An isolated incident, I here you cry?

BOW DOWN TO ME, PUNY HUMANS

I AM OMNIPOTENT AND ALL-SEEING

Clearly, the showpiece of our new inanimate Overlord is the three wind turbine blades. Now, I say this with utmost confidence. It has been complete for around a year. 95% of the time it has been inhabited, I have had to look at it [I live a 15 minute walk away] and I can say with conviction, I have never seen them turn. Not once.

I'm all for environmental design. In fact, I actively encourage it. Good environmental design is a crux point to limit climate change. But the blades are completely tokenistic; a greenwash. It boasts as being the first building to incorporate wind energy into its architecture, potentially providing up to 8% of the energy used in the building, but what good is that when they sit in complete stillness the majority of the time? In fact, the blades are so noisy, they have to turn them off at night anyway. Furthermore, the audacity to claim green credentials from a feature which has such an enormous expenditure of carbon to engineer is ludicrous.

"Now I can take a shit while I think of all the poor people that live below!"

The more troublesome issue though is its place in the apparent redevelopment of Elephant and Castle. The gargantuan effort and cost to erect a skyscraper, hideous or not, is completely disproportional to its supposed benefits. Elephant and Castle's problem is not a need of housing, and certainly not a need for luxury housing. Have you been to E&C? It is a concrete shithole with no public space, and no commercial areas, apart from the sadly dilapidated shopping centre.

The money needs to be pumped into public amenities and local grass roots programs, rather than some monumental dildo that seems to try its hardest to disengage with its surroundings completely, snootily looking down on the proletariat while the £200k a year tosser in the penthouse can gob at the passing poor people.

Hate it or hate it, its staked its rather sizeable claim on the London skyline and will be ever-present for ever and ever and ever. Still, at least it won't dominate it for long. Over yonder on the horizon, a new, larger behemoth emergeth.

Why Was Weiwei Whisked Away?

Ai Weiwei fucking up some Priceless Vase = Art

It really blows my mind that one of the most prominent, politically vocal and current artists alive can just be vaporised out of existence by the Chinese government. It is less of an issue of how, because, frankly, if the government over there want you gone, the wind is what you shall become. It's more a question of why. Moreover, why risk it?

Now, Ai Wei Wei has been a bloody nuisance to the PRC [People's Republic of China]. His art primarily deals with China's contemporary role in the world, as well as Chinese tradition and culture, which is just about tolerated by the PRC. No, his friction with the government comes from being an outspoken critic of the autocratic nature of the government. He is a fervent promoter of freedom of speech, something sadly lacking in his home country, and has got him into a whole heap of shit.

Back in 2008, China seems to have turned the corner. After 30 years of political isolation, they were hosting the biggest show on Earth, allowing 204 countries into their realm and, at the centre of it all was the Bird's Nest designed by Herzog & De Meuron in collaboration with, you guessed it, Ai Weiwei. China, for the first time in a long time were crawling from underneath the stone of surreptitiousness with its star artist in tow.

Not Pictured: Artistic Integrity
[Although to be fair he lost that when
he did the Crystal Skull]

Then something happened. Ai refused to be photographed with the building and started to criticise the Olympics as a whole, directing his disappointment to Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou [Directors of both Olympic Ceremonies] saying "All the shitty directors in the world are involved. It's disgusting," Ai said. "I don't like anyone who shamelessly abuses their profession, who makes no moral judgment. It is mindless." Asked about why he designed the Olympic Stadium if he was so opposed to it, he stated "I did it because I love design and the idea of how it would be looked at by others."

He hated that the Olympic games, a symbol for freedom and global togetherness was being used as a propaganda tool by the PRC stating "I hate the kind of feeling stirred up by promotion or propaganda … It's the kind of sentiment when you don't stick to the facts, but try to make up something, to mislead people away from a true discussion." 

Bird's Nest Stadium.
Not Pictured: Ai Weiwei taking a piss on it.

He abhorred that the stadium has become a shining symbol of Modern China calling it a "pretend smile...I would feel ashamed if I just designed something for glamour or to show some kind of fake image." From this point on, Ai was under extremely close surveillance. A year and a half later, his studio was knocked down for being 'illegally built', followed by his disappearance and that of a few of his studio personel.


Lets put this in a little context, shall we, kids? Lets say one of our many prominent artists, lets pick Damien Hurst [public, not personal opinion], decided to go out in public and call David Cameron a"Shit-eating public school prick".Repercussions? none. The last thing I would expect Cameron to do is bag Hirst in a 4x4 and keep him in the Downing Street basement with a sock in his mouth, goading him by calling him a speccy twat while knuckle-dusting his face.

But why would China risk kidnapping someone with such an international reputation, shining a very bright light on all the shady goings-on in autocratic China? Why couldn't they let him talk his trash and leave him alone, and show how far they have come from the cultural revolution of the 60's, instead of proving that it was still deeply woven into the fabric of modern China?

As far as I'm concerned the PRC are in a lose lose scenario. Kill him and risk a tsunami of humanitarian backlash, not just from the international community, but internally too. Let him go, and Ai Weiwei, already vocal before this happened, will exile to the west and give a gritty recount of all that happened. I hope for the sake of Ai and his family that it's the latter.

Free Ai Weiwei!

AL/

Wim Crouwel - A Graphic Odyssey

I went to the excellent Wim Crouwel exhibition at the Design Museum yesterday and I thought I would share my musings with y'all.

Coming from an architectural education, I was always confused about what was so special and unique about graphic designers. I mean, we all had to lay stuff out, pick colour palettes, use specific fonts, except that us architecture students had to design the actual 3D thing that was going to be represented in the beautifully laid out sheet. All they had to do was make a pretty pattern and pick colours. Graphic Designers. Wasters.

Over the course of the last year I have been working closely with graphic designers and they are a particular breed. Controlled, obsessive to the point of OCD and whimsical. Its actually pretty amazing to see one work up close, because only then do you realise that you can never do what they do. You'd go mental spending moving stuff around on Illustrator for two days straight like a cryptographer trying to decipher a puzzle and then at the end, they produce something so beautifully composed that it makes all your monkey-fisted attempts at sheet layouts look like scrawlings made by a blind toddler.

Wim Crouwel is one of these people, except he was doing this shit without the luxury of computer aided programs and with very little precedent before him.

I could go on about how influential he has been to modern design since the late 50's, his outstanding 30 year body of work he did for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and his time as the founder of Total Design studio in the 60's. Rather, I'm going to focus on arguably his most influential and famous work.

What was truly awe-inspiring was his creation of the New Alphabet. When Wim saw what traditional text looked like on then-revolutionary Cathode Ray-based phototypesetting screens, he was not happy. The limitations of the equipment meant that curved lines suffered under the limited resolution, making it look horribly pixelated. Solution? New font, one that is specifically constructed to deal with the machine, made of only horizontal and vertical lines. Public reaction? something along the lines of 'what the fuck'. Because it was so far removed from anything at the time, his fellow peers were outraged. It sparked public debate and it encouraged others to create their own typefaces, practically rejuvenating typography into a new digital world. Does it look familiar? Probably, because it was the font used on the cover of Joy Division's Substance album.

I cant be arsed to put more images of this amazing man's legacy of work, but definately check it out. I'm sure you will come across stuff that you've seen before. Oh, and go to the Design Museum for the exhibition and get some fucking culture in you, you layabout.

AL//

Erm...

OK, I'll be honest from the off. I mean, we don't want to start this relationship with false pretences. Mum always told me the key to a long stable relationship is honesty. My reasons for doing this blog is yet unknown. It will be art, design and architecture based with intermittent ramblings about how good / shit certain things I see or read are. I also like animals; there may be occasional postings about fucking cool animals.

Anyway, enough about my vague intentions. I'll thought I'll kick of the blog with the inspiration for my ridiculously contrived blog name: Archigram.

Ron Herron - Walking City

Started in the AA [Architectural Association for all you Philistines] in the 60's by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene. They were responsible for blowing up modern architecture and making the most avante-garde gestures in a time of sterility in the profession. I mean, completely out-there ideas. 5AM hallucinogenically-fuelled ideas that you and your mate Ian had at Uni. The picture above is a walking city for fuck sake!

The fundamental difference between Ron Herron and the hypothetical Ian is that Ron Herron came with the idea due to cities being too stagnant to take advantage of fluctuating locations of the world's resources and can draw, and Ian struggles with the concept of gravity as a pulling force and the closest he got to drawing was compositional series of penises on the inside of public toilets.

Due to the current social change in the air, as it was in the 60's, the time is right to bring back the ethos of Archigram, that spark of radicalism in design that triggers, fuels and fundamentally changes the social fabric. So remember kids, next time your on a bender, remember to keep a pen and paper handy.

AL//