Foreword
The Case of the Missing Parisian Absinthe Kiosk
The Betjemanisation of South London
The Dreamed Vortex
Simpering Psychomuff
The Vegetable Liberation Front
The Shitley Experiment
The Slightly Underground Railway
An Abridged Larkin Poem
That Giraffe’s Head Was Always Coming Off
Twitterborough
The Age of Oxygen
A Multi-Dimensional World
There Is No Rationalism but Rationalism
How Kryptogel Will Change the World
Zeppelins Full of Shit
Velvet Smackpad
The Molecules of Swinging London
Hubmakers v Spacesmiths
Youthanasia
Slow Modernism
The Irony Bridge
Pathetic Fallacy 1, Emphatic Delusion 0
The Decadent Egg
Remagination
It’s the Sulk I’m Really After
One One
Pudding Gateshead
The Collide-O-Scope
A Strange Glint
The New Pop-Uption
19th-Century Brickdust
The Certification of Public Space
The Blard
A Cross-Vectored Media Partnership
The Airpunch
Goodbye Olympic Rebadging Task Force
Magnetic Values
The Chapel of Notre Dame du Marmalade
Latest Books About Icons
An Analogue Underground Cotswolds
Little Stripey Crestfallen Moons
The Jockular Campus
Metarchitectural Sausages
Looks Nice Theory
Battle of the Styles
The Hard-Working Class
Dysgustopia
Windhampton
I Am Grand Designsy
I Sense My Enemies Massing Like Simpering Starlings
Five Versions of Me
Kenny Axe-of-Wrath, Meet Julie Bloodbath
Diana Princess of Wales Laying a Wreath at an Accident Blackspot Wearing Sunglasses Plus She’s in a Wheelchair
The People’s Centre for Cultural Transmution
The K’buum el-K’buum Residuals Farm
If Only Time Will Tell, Should Architecture Really be a Narrative?
Back to the Futurniture
Right Enough to be True, True Enough to be Trite
Human Content Management
A Critical Stream of Piss
Obituary: T. Dan Hooker
Little Gatsby
Ha Ha Ha You Fucking Ants
This Sorry Cabal of Pretension
The Plagiarism Assizes
Cross-Glaminated Poverty Style-Out
Eurafrica: A New Bivalve of Hope
Masked Grans Dancing on a Bungalow Roof
From Fenestrated Parabola to Melty Fucklump
The Strategic Mentalising Unit
Supra-Heezy Ionised Piff
Insulational Rescue
An Inspector Calls
Owning the Vagination
A Bubble of Absence Enclosed by Sentient Retardant Foam
Get a Grip, Munchniks
Laughable Bear in a Frock
Extended Prison Break
Yesterday’s News Is Tomorrow’s Emergency Clothing
The Emptiness Between All Particles
Fuck Shitter
The Epic Space Foundation
Oligarchitectural Capitalism Versus Patriarchitectural Sexism
The Right to Let Die
Evil in a Pork Pie Hat
Rough Concrete and Mulleted Genitals
The Henge
Curse You, Buildings That Resemble Breasts Quarterly
Yipster Gentrification
The Dalek Clusterfuck
Honeycombed Privatised Air
Twirly Atlantis
Austerity Christmas Human Turducken
The Worm Is Cast
This Feudopolitan Life
Hello Kinky Pinky
Post-Ecological Re-Regeneration
If It Ain’t Broke, Amend It
History Eats Itself
The Twelve Step Plan
Not Being Funny but Black People Don’t Do Gardening, Do They?
The Bees Have It
A Sense of Placenta
Acknowledgements
Supporters
Copyright
Ian Martin is an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer. His credits include The Death of Stalin, The Thick of It, Veep, Time Trumpet and In the Loop. He writes regularly for the Guardian and the Architects’ Journal. His book The Coalition Chronicles is published by Faber & Faber.
To my beloved wife Eileen,
who has put up with this shit since 1973.
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and e-book wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. Here, at the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.
Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.
If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type epicspace in the promo code box when you check out.
Thank you for your support,
Dan, Justin and John
Founders, unbound
Ian Martin is many things. He is a man, certainly. I know this to be a fact as I was once behind in him in the passport queue at Baltimore Airport and the lady doing the checking didn’t so much as flinch. He is unique among people who don’t actually behave as if they’re the only person in the world to have written and acted in both The Thick of It and its American cousin Veep. He is what certain kinds of journalists would call ‘an ex-rocker’ who can be provoked to violence by three bars of jazz and soothed again by being shown a picture of Bach. And he is without doubt my very favourite writer of comic prose in the English language.
The best comic writers are those who not only squirt their ink at the right targets or hammer out the perfect images, they make the language itself funny: the rhythm, the sound, the colour. They’re the ones who make you laugh at the very words they use. That’s Ian Martin. He can spin the English language round his fingers like a conjuror’s coin.
Take the occasion – as related in this book – when he was appointed Architectural Nickname Czar to ensure that new buildings are given better epithets than ‘The Shard’ or ‘The Gherkin’. The list of suggestions that follows is a sustained cannonade of impossible inventiveness and comic poetry, including but not limited to: The Shiny Tumulus, The Stilty Lump, The Skyfister, The Extrudel, The Glandmark and The Sentient Plume. And I simply cannot imagine any other columnist currently thumping a keyboard on a regular basis who would title a piece anything like ‘I Sense My Enemies Massing Like Simpering Starlings’.
That voice is beguiling, unique and rather influential. You’ll find it, among other places, in the mouths of Malcolm Tucker and Selina Meyer, even when it isn’t Ian himself doing the writing. The great Tony Roche, one of the original quartet of filthpots who dishonoured the BBC with the vilely crude unnecessariness of The Thick of It, has said that he coined the word ‘omnishambles’ – later named Word of the Year 2012 by people who imagine such things are a worthwhile expenditure of calories – partly in homage to Ian’s style.
The present volume which you hold in your hands – or, for future readers, which you have think-accessed on the Kindle Mindwave Intranexus™ – is essentially a long bar on which are lined up over a hundred espresso shots of pure Martin. A collection of satirical pieces written for the Architects’ Journal, they naturally, and indeed contractually, take architecture as their subject, but their targets are far wider ranging than that. If you’ll allow me to be a ponce for a minute – or more realistically, if you’ll allow me to continue being a ponce for quite a long while – I would say that they are satires on an entire culture: our politics, the inanity of the consumer society, journalism, faddishness, regional developmental funding, social media, ‘Heritage’ and, in fact, pretty much everything else.
But more than anything, they are a satire on language itself. Or rather, on the way that it’s used now: the self-satisfied idiocy of corporate-speak, the emperor’s-new-clothes-pretension of architects and ‘creatives’, the banality of marketing. I’m reminded about seventy-four times a day of ‘I need some marketing blurt in a nice font. Neutral to the point of meaningless’ from his piece ‘Magnetic Values’. He catches the tone and the timbre of the use and misuse of English and twists it into his own filigree comic structures. By turns angry, contemptuous, resigned, pitying, self-pitying, mischievous, despairing and hopeful, these pieces are never anything less than whirlingly funny; inventive and invective in perfect measure – like S. J. Perelman stubbing his toe.
I once met Ian for lunch. (Not the time he threatened to stab the music speaker with a fork if they didn’t turn the jazz off, but another one.) I was two minutes late, and on arriving at the table I discovered him already seated and a cocktail by my place setting.
‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he said, fishing an olive from his drink, ‘I ordered some martinis.’
Then he got us some stout to go with the chicken livers (you can take the boy out of the East End, etc., etc.), wine for the mains and Armagnac with the dessert.
‘It’s so nice,’ he subtly belched as I tried to remember how to sit on a chair, ‘to find someone who’ll stick with you right from the martinis through to the brandies.’
And that’s what I recommend you do with this book: Don’t dip. You’re in the finest, most entertaining company you could want. Just start with the martinis and go on through to the brandies. Your head will be joyfully spinning as you leave.
Chris Addison, 2016
With Special Thanks to the Enlightened Patrons
Chris MacAllister, Richard Newman,
Paul Vincent and Robert Willis
MONDAY To Lourdes, where I’m creating a boutique hotel. It’s 150 years since an innocent 14-year-old country girl experienced visions of 280 saints, some of them robed, in en-suite bathrooms. Now that dream is a reality.
My own contribution to the town’s tradition of five-star indulgence pushes innovation to new levels of luxury, or possibly the other way round. The spa’s got a Vatican-approved infinity pool, for instance. Each room has a 50-inch ectoplasma TV, wi-fi access to purgatory, plus underfloor healing throughout.
TUESDAY Finish my design for The Amazin’ Amazon Rainforest Experience, just south of Blackpool.
I’ve had local scepticism from the start, e.g. why would Lancastrians pay to see rain-themed anything, rain is our AIR, if dozy bastards are that desperate to see rain INSIDE a building there are several shopping centres within driving distance of Blackpool all built in the 1970s, can’t we just have a nice dry supercasino instead with a karaoke bar you daft southern trollop.
Sometimes I think people simply refuse to understand the principles of critical globalism.
The architectural establishment’s pissed off, too, because I’ve taken over the gig from Jacob Kinderegg. The world’s favourite jabbering death fetishist parted company with his clients when they refused to sign off on the concept drawings.
They wanted an immersive environment suitable for school parties and coach outings. Jacob wanted to explore the mournful cadence of human suffering, with the entire contents of the biodome obliterated over the course of a year by ruthless loggers in Nazi uniforms, two performances daily. The empty biohusk would remain as a public shrine to loss and absence.
I ring Jacob just to make sure there are no hard feelings. He’s cool. And busy. Just landed a Museum of Fatal Illnesses in Antwerp. His Potato Faminarium in Baltimore tops out next month. Plus, he’s now guest lecturing at the University of Kent on the fractal aesthetics of torture.
WEDNESDAY My friend Dusty Penhaligon the conservactionist calls to cancel our cycling tour of Cumbernauld. He’s appearing as expert witness in a high-profile case at the Old Bailey.
Six criminal Cockney types are accused of stealing a priceless Adolf Loos building from a suburban street in Zurich. In a daring armed raid, the seminal Montessori House of 1911 was snatched from its site over the course of a fortnight by a gang posing as international building inspectors.
Very little has been recovered. A couple of window frames, some floorboards, a ‘Novelty Native American Cigar Dispenser’. Police believe most of the house has been reassembled as a villa in northern Cyprus, which doesn’t acknowledge architectural extradition protocol.
Dusty is rightly alarmed at the recent spate of building heists. This year alone we have lost a Le Corbusier gymnasium from Chandigarh (brutally dismantled and resold in pieces on eBay), a Frank Lloyd Wright pharmacy in Michigan (loaded in sections onto a flatbed truck by ‘bug exterminators’) and a unique 19th-century Parisian absinthe kiosk by Viollet-le-Duc (wrenched from the ground in an audacious daylight helicopter raid).
I agree with Dusty. The world made more sense in the 20th century, before sharp-shouldered yuppies and the internet ruined everything. When people didn’t lock their historic buildings. When St Petersburg was called Leningrad and didn’t have a Malaysian skyline. When you could still smoke in church. Curse this century.
THURSDAY Redesign Vancouver, making it less ‘Vancouverised’.
FRIDAY I’ve set aside the whole day for CPD, or Contiguous Pretentious Development.
I put on Radio 3, adjust my cravat and start sketching. They’re not just sketches, obviously, they’re an unfurling of sequential insights into the world around me. Today I’m using my favourite insight-enabling tool, Ixworth & Donningfold’s Traditional Draughting Pencil for Gentlemen. Lovely. Especially thick and black.
I’m sketching on baking paper, too, for extra gravitas. The morning passes in a delirium of abstract geometry and intuition. What do these sketches represent? The question is as pointless as it is impudent. Let posterity decide what they mean!
After lunch, urban collage-making in a collarless blouson.
SATURDAY Five-a-side sociological football. Driveable Suburbanism 2 Walkable Urbanism 1, after extra-time sudden-death runover.
SUNDAY Work on my Lourdes project in the recliner. After a while, have an ‘out-of-body’ axonometric experience.
February 14, 2008
MONDAY It’s an ill wind that blows nobody a job. My friend Loaf, in his capacity as Cadbury’s Creme Egg mayor of London, has just handed me an amazing commission. ‘Fancy reworking south London, matey? All of it. In the style of John Betjeman …’
It’s part of his four-year plan to ‘literate’ the capital into distinct quadrants. The East End is to be redesigned as The Complete Dickens, featuring lots of characters and bankruptcies and poor houses. The Olympic site is exempt, obviously. No such thing as a Dickensian Olympics has ever taken place, so far.
‘We enjoyed great expectations of course,’ says Loaf, in Latin, ‘but now we are obliged to plough through hard times.’ Oh yeah, the Olympics, I’d forgotten. Let’s hope they don’t make a ‘complete Dickens’ of that. His giant egg suit gives a little shrug.
Meanwhile, the built environment of north London will be nudged gently into Shakespearian tragedy with some cathartic social housing and moveable trees. Loaf says he’s inclined to leave west London as it is, tightening the conservation regime to keep that ‘terrific, fizzing Martin Amisy feel’.
None of these has the allocated budget of MY quadrant though – enough to sink a small nationalised bank. I feel giddy with power. If we’re going the full Betjeman, can we bring back rationing, illicit sex, horse-drawn milk carts, telephone kiosks with big buttons and smoking on the top decks of buses?
Loaf considers for a second. ‘Look, let’s just keep it Betjeman-esque, OK? I have no intention of alienating the gay community. Or the formidable cancer fun run women. Betjeman is simply a developmental theme. I have a vision of the future, old chum, and it is to make south London the most dynamic, the most dazzling residential heritage zone in the whole of Cadbury’s Europe.’
Within that massive comedy egg there’s a demonstrably strong intellect at work.
TUESDAY Redesign Yorkshire, expanding the borders slightly so it’s less full of itself.
WEDNESDAY Sketch out some preliminary ideas for my Bath Drawing Board Museum.
I say ‘sketch’, though a) I’m using beta software developed by rocket scientists, and b) the heavy lifting’s being done by my nanofuturologist friend Beansy, who illegally downloaded Vectormatique 2.0 for me. ‘I didn’t realise Classical pastiche involved so much repetition,’ he says. ‘We’ll have this banged out by lunchtime. Not rocket science, is it?’
We’re soon done, and I email the drawings to a little workshop off Farringdon Road where they print it out on genuine antique paper. Oh shit, I’ve forgotten the design statement. No problem, says Beansy, and navigates to Reactionist, a random polemic generator.
After a couple of goes we get: ‘Architecture has entered a new virtual realm of discourse, stripped of the practical and pedagogical contexts that once defined its disciplinary core. That’s why it is vital to remember and honour the Paraffin Lamp …’ I change the last bit to Drawing Board and email it over for parchmenting.
THURSDAY Lunch with my noble friend Richard, who whines on and on about how nobody listens to him now he’s a Lord. I tune out after a while. No wonder everyone’s calling him Mopey Dick.
FRIDAY Draft my initial five-point plan for the Betjemanisation of south London.
1. Comprehensive audit of apsidal chancels, Nonconformist spirelets and schools by E. R. Robson in the style of Norman Shaw.
2. River idealisation scheme to allow the waters of the Wandle to flow more lugubriously.
3. Replace ‘workers’ flats in fields of soya beans, towering up like silver pencils with ‘obedient, cheerful Cockney slums in terraced rows, their lavatories without’.
4. Restore faded Victorian grandeur of buildings now operating as nightclubs by revoking their nightclub licences.
5. Reach out to underclass with cultural education project, e.g. correct deployment of teddy bear is under arm of young poet, not amid cellophane pilings at ghastly roadside shrine.
SATURDAY Bump into Andrew Lloyd Webber at a Baroque fundraiser. Result. He’s on board with Project Betjeman and has agreed to stimulate interest in Evensong among south Londoners, via the telly.
SUNDAY In the recliner when Charles rings. He’s also fully behind the Betj-Up. Suddenly realise this project appeals to all the wrong people. Now I’ve talked myself into a depression. Go to pub to see if I can spend my way out of one.
November 4, 2008
MONDAY Meeting of the Olympic Rebadging Taskforce. The gravity of the situation is taking its toll, even on Games Minister Suzi Towel.
That compulsory Mexican wave we have before Apologies for Absence gets more perfunctory each time. Nobody does the good-natured booing now when the wave gets to Treasury Steve and he refuses to join in. Oh sure, Suzi still says ‘Yay!’ every time the word ‘Olympics’ is mentioned. But these days it’s without the exclamation mark.
Still. Not all gloom. The IOC inspectors came over for a tour of the building site – correction, Delivery Park – and went home happy. It’s amazing how much international goodwill can be generated by a good lunch, a Cornetto on an open-topped Routemaster and a nap on the plane home. No awkward questions about the £9.3 billion budget, which we’re rather cleverly rebadging as being ‘under control’.
Suzi explains. ‘A dog is for life, not just for Christmas. And the Olympics – yay – is for the sustainable regeneration of east London, not just for a fortnight of world-class competitive sport and various sponsorship opportunities. We’re still three years off, and the budget is very much a puppy. It’s under control in the sense that we’ve taught it to wee and poo outside, but obviously it has to develop into a complete dog, doesn’t it?’
Meanwhile, we’re further downgrading architectural expectations to Level 2 (‘mild irritant, avoid contact with eyes’), ironically announcing plans to ‘recycle’ the Velodrome, and redefining ‘shit-eating grin’ as ‘brave face’.
TUESDAY Britain now languishes at the bottom of the World Nomenclature League, and the Department of Entertainment is looking for a Building Nickname Czar. Fingers crossed.
WEDNESDAY Working on my nicknames. It’s time this country took them seriously. In Seoul or Reykjavik, a new building is automatically assigned an architectural name by the relevant federal bureau of appellations. The result? Some nondescript bollocks is called The Sexy Rainbow Wand or Enfolding Love Bun.
In Britain we leave all naming to our journalists. Result? Desaturated rubbish such as The Gherkin, The Shard, The – come on, for God’s sake – Cheese Grater. Worse, they always pretend buildings have been ‘dubbed’. When a journalist says ‘dubbed’ it means ‘given a nickname, by me’. Bastards.
THURSDAY Prep notes for a lecture at the Institute of Plasmic Arts. It’s called ‘The Misery of Excellence’ and will convince everyone that I’m in the middle of writing a sarcastic masterpiece about how architecture has been sidelined into a zero-risk compliance culture, even though I’ve only actually written this sentence so far. ‘He who lives by the kitemark, dies by the kitemark.’ That sounds good, I might say that.
FRIDAY The Architectural Nickname Czar gig would look great on my portfolio, which this year runs to half a page of A4. I email the following universally deployable building names to the entertainment department:
The uPod. The Kebabel. The Shiny Tumulus. The Chamfered Cock. The Glazed Rictus. The Parenthesis. The Fat Bonus. The Clumpty. The Saucy Dalek. The Eco-Eco-Bang-Bang. The Big Ask. The Dreamed Vortex. The Petrified Discharge. The Stilty Lump. The Sentient Plume. The Perpendiculon. The Urban Stook. The Skyfister. The Messaging Ascender. The Pishtank. The Iconic Pandemonium. The Chip Naan. The Very Hungry Fuckerpilla. The Bosh. The Cloverfield Thunderbolt. The Laughing Prolapse. The Extrudel. The Batard. The Carbon-Retentive Colon. The Vertical Conga. The Paranoid Fishcake. The Aircosh. The Digital Tampon. The Niggling Appendix. The Satirical Standup. The Shish. The Glandmark. The Convincing Wig. The ! The Crispy Beacon. The Megaphor. The Arrested Gush. The Token Block. The Aerodoodle. The Heliographic Slatfarm. The Lifecake. The Courgetto. The Lesbian Tongue. The End.
SATURDAY Absolutely no response. Sod them. Decide I’ll get absolutely wankered at lunchtime. I’m meeting my old friend Darcy the architecture critic and his overdressed dachshund, Bauhau.
Then a text cancelling lunch. Odd, not like Darcy at all. And as excuses go, ‘Bauhau’s got a migraine’ seems a bit feeble.
SUNDAY Oh lovely. Brilliant. In the Creative on Sunday, a drivelly piece on The Preciousness of Our Named Heritage. ‘By the entertainment department’s new Architectural Dubbing Czar, Darcy Farquear’say …’
There’s a photo of him holding what looks like a squirming Beef Wellington. It may be a small dog in some sort of fashionable polycarbonate sheath. Or not, who cares?
March 5, 2009
A quiz for ARCHITECTS ONLY. Are you a national architectural treasure? Let’s find out …
QUESTION 1 We begin with that basic indicator of architectural genius, innovative cladding. Have you specified any of the following materials recently: zipped leather, decommissioned weapons, bubblewrap, knitted fibre-optic cable, chainmail, an energy plasma field or a biodegradable medium – toast, say?
If you have, proceed to the next question. If you haven’t, you are neither pushing boundaries nor challenging perceptions. You’re definitely not a ‘national architectural treasure’. You’re not even a player, fool!
QUESTION 2 Do your buildings rise dramatically from the site as a fluid and organic whole, igniting the environment and creating a dynamic beacon of optimism in a world numbed by negativity?
If yes, proceed to the next question. If your buildings just sort of sit there like big fat lumps, you’re rubbish. Abandon this questionnaire.
QUESTION 3 Have you been photographed by a magazine recently, pretending not to have noticed the camera, surrounded by inert props and apparently mumbling to yourself about how we have to rebrand the profession? Yeah? Then kindly leave the page. National treasures do not discuss such things.
If, on the other hand, you’ve said in interview that space is a material shaped by dreams and that you strive for an architecture which goes beyond mere form-making into a systemic alchemic polemic whatever, congratulations. You’re a probationary treasure.
QUESTION 4 Do you disdain Britain’s suburbs and its human contents? Do you think people who’d rather go to a carpet warehouse than the Donmar Warehouse are at least misguided, if not actually in breach of international law?
Do you think barbeques in/and/or gardens are utterly selfish? Do you say things like Good Taste is the Enemy of Creativity, or Comfortable Furniture is the Enemy of, I don’t know, Standing Up?
Of course you do. You’re an architect. It’s a trick question.
QUESTION 5 Do you use ‘critique’ as a verb, all the bloody time? If not, you’re fired. Please leave the national treasure boardroom.
QUESTION 6 Of course, of COURSE, we all condemn violations of human rights. Especially when it involves the exploitation of construction workers hired like expendable human donkeys, risking their lives to build preposterous and effete creations coaxed from the imaginations of architects by morally neutral tranches of fee income, in parts of the world now designated as hedonistic face-stuffing shop-filled ethnically cleansed pampering playgrounds for callous shitheads who believe it’s their right to be fawned over like fat demigods when they’re on holiday.
If your policy is either to refuse to work on such projects, or on a point of principle to be not successful enough to land any, your hopes of becoming a national treasure are slim.
If, however, you can keep a straight face and say things like, ‘I am committed to supporting our client in achieving equitable working conditions’, and once went to an ethical fundraiser where Sting played his fucking lute after dinner, congratulations. You certainly sound like a national architectural treasure.
QUESTION 7 Rearrange the following words to make a coherent sentence: is, urban, masque, provocative, the, integrated, resonance, lifeview, of, freestyle, curvery, and.
If you tried to do this, I’m afraid you are not a treasure. If, however, you suggest that the randomness of the elements has its own occult interconnectivity, you could be on to something. If you imagined the individual words scattered across Photoshopped montages of city streets at night with coloured blobs and jagged lines, you’re probably already a regional treasure at least.
QUESTION 8 Do you ever think about writing poetry? If you do: sorry. The national treasure express has pulled out, leaving you dithering in the waiting room unsure of what your true vocation is. If you bashfully explain at dinner parties that your architecture IS poetry, well done. That’s exactly the sort of simpering psychomuff the Pritzker lot love.
QUESTION 9 Who do you think you are – GOD? Ah-ha! Got you. You were doing so well, too. A genuine national architectural treasure does not believe in God. They believe in a universe of infinite self-confidence with, at its theological centre, an omnipotent sulk.
QUESTION 10 Have you ever done an icon? If not, please produce one, then retake questions 1–9.
June 11, 2009
MONDAY The Tamworth Design Festival has been running annually since the late eighth century and has over the years showcased some truly innovative products. The demountable Witch Detector, for instance. The Snook Rack. The Pig Recycler.
These days it’s mostly furniture. But the artisans of Mercia have lost none of their native cunning, creating hugely desirable conversation pieces at imaginative prices. Today we’re judging the Seating entries.
The winner is Sadface & Gentley’s ‘Recession’, a clever reworking of the sofa narrative. A giant Spacehopper the size of a Ford Fiesta, partially deflated, with stumpy little ironic legs. It asks existential questions via the user. Whose face am I ‘actually’ sitting on? What do the apparently redundant giant ribbed handles signify? HOW much? Etc.
TUESDAY A lot of steam has gone out of the Olympic Rebadging Task Force lately. Even under the giddy guidance of Games Minister Suzi Towel – ‘Akela after too many Lambrinis’ – our old esprit de corps is crumbling. All the consultants are talking directly to the Shadow Olympics team now, and all the political people are lining up jobs as consultants.
Suzi calls the meeting to order with a Mexican Wave. ‘Come on people!’ she roars. ‘The Olympics (YAY!) won’t rebadge itselves!’
We need to make ‘roads and sheds’ sound more important, as this will basically be all there is to see by the time Voters Go to the Polls. Infrastructure may be dull but Mr Blair taught us that the public sector must have a giggly subtext to make it more competitive. With itself, if necessary. That’s why a ‘public library’ is now an ‘ideas store’. Why a ‘health clinic’ is now a ‘wellness hub’. Why a ‘council swimming pool’ is now a luxury apartment block.
After some thought, we rebadge the new roads as ‘go channels’. We rebadge the sheds where the roadbuilding machinery is kept as ‘power bases’. Then it’s Any Other Business, or ‘lunch’.
WEDNESDAY Winner of the Tamworth Design Festival’s Lighting category: The Butchlamp by Connor Chance. Scaffolding pole with a 60-watt bulb at the end, £1,095 plus VAT.
THURSDAY It’s easy to see why everyone’s a little in love with Amy Blackwater, the extreme ecological activist. She’s easily the most attractive woman in a balaclava I’ve ever met, her default setting is ‘engagingly enraged’ and, compellingly, she winds architects right the fuck up. She and her friends in ‘the collective’ are the nearest thing the profession has to a guilty conscience.
We’re having a pint in the Victorian Farm, a dilapidated pub in rural Essex reborn as an experimental theatre venue. Smoking is allowed on the condition that all drinkers are ‘performers’ taking part in a ‘piece’. At least half of us are drinking, eating and smoking through balaclavas. There are a few new concealed faces today – religious fundamentalists, here to show solidarity with the ecomentalists in the ongoing War Against Living Walls.
Over the last few weeks Amy and co. have been carrying out night raids on buildings with living walls and turning off the water pumps. ‘It’s sick!’ splutters Amy. ‘These captive plants might as well be veal babies, yeah? They’re being sustained by a life support machine – itself guzzling up Earth’s Precious Resources – in some Frankensteinian nightmare. How is this ecologically sound? In a world divided into gluttony and starvation it’s about as morally defensible as CAT FOOD!’
God, she is wonderful. Her nutty Christian friends think so too. They reckon living walls are the new Tower of Babel – a symbol of heathen hubris. A manifestation of evil. Architects, once again, believing they are omnipotent. ‘If bloody architects want to grow things round their stupid buildings,’ says Amy through a cloud of roll-up smoke, ‘let them stick geraniums in a pot. Or have a bloody Virginia Creeper. Or …’
Ooh, I know. Hanging baskets. Architects LOATHE them. In fact, hatred of hanging baskets is a totally dependable bourgeois signifier. Amy looks as thoughtful as anyone can inside a balaclava. Hm. Direct action to liberate living walls, AND a hanging basket guerilla campaign? Yes!
FRIDAY Winner of the Tables category: The Planolith, by Daughters of Radon. An artist’s impression of a ‘hard air’ rectangle on bubblejets of psychic energy. Not yet in production.
SATURDAY Sketch out a reassembled Euston Arch, with hanging baskets.
SUNDAY Cross-culturally-reference self in the recliner.
September 24, 2009
MONDAY A breakthrough with my research project for the Bow Window Group, a conservative think tank, provisionally titled Affordable Homes for Affordable People.
Working late into the night in my alchemic laboratory of ideas, I accidentally spilled some notes from the control group into the experimental flux capacitor. After the dry ice cleared and my nausea had subsided a bit I discovered that I had somehow merged the cultural notions of homeless chic and moral bankruptcy to create a new sociological construct: Affordable Poverty.
I think the tank’s going to love the sound of this. It faces squarely the twin challenges of inadequate housing for the poor AND the aspirationally underperforming constituency living in it.
If we as a nation decide we can afford to sustain this delicate ecosystem, possibly at a lower cost in the future, then the minority of people enjoying the fruits of poverty had better shut up if they know what’s good for them.
TUESDAY Add psychogeographical layers to my Birmingham Hippocampus Scheme. Then erase them, leaving an imagined ghostly imprint of enigmatic drivel for insurance purposes.
WEDNESDAY To Shitley, a relentlessly average town in the North East, where the local authority is conducting an interesting experiment in economic denial. They’ve started fixing fake shop facades to empty high street properties so that ‘retail areas remain as theoretically vibrant as possible’.
The initiative is part of Shitley District Council’s inward investment programme and is clearly aimed at the opportunistic businessman glancing from the back seat of a car and thinking ‘Oh, that’s impressive. They’ve got a continental delicatessen here. AND several vaguely defined lifestyle-related boutiquey shops. This place must have a sizeable bourgeois hinterland. Sharon, get me the chief executive of Shitley District Council, stat. I’m in the mood to invest and I’m feeling SAUCY …’
It’s obviously not aimed at pedestrians, who are taunted with a phantom bagel kiosk here, duped by the hollow mockery of a counterfeit halal butcher’s there. I’m taken on a promenade along the high street by what local paper The Shitley Chronicle solemnly calls ‘council bosses’. To wit:
• Three grey-faced planners in identical fleeces.
• Two metres of sulking iPod-dependent teenage work experience from Economic Development apparently called Jack.
• The fat, short mayor of Shitley wearing a heavy chain of office and looking like an airbag’s gone off inside his fucking head.
• A hungover, barely functioning hack who might be from the council press office, or The Shitley Chronicle, or both.
• A Smoke Freedom Enforcement Officer in high-vis tabard.
• A random hanger-on complaining about the government who is a) on a Shopmobility scooter and b) off her meds.
One of the sepulchral planners explains, without moving his mouth, the purpose of this tour. It is to give me a frontline view of how the fake shopfront can be a valuable tool in the forward masterplanning toolbox.
I’ve halfway screwed up my face into the obligatory Sneer of Ultimate Disdain when he adds they’d like me to advise them on how this civic optimism might be expanded, and mentions a very attractive fee.
I amend my face to a Look of Serious Thought.
THURSDAY Dash off an edgy, urban scheme that both celebrates and modifies the concept of free will in a pluralistic society, then gaze pretentiously out of the window, savouring my maverick genius.
FRIDAY Put the finishing touches to my Shitley pitch. Obviously, I’ve loaded it with all the usual signifiers and called it ‘an outline proposal to develop economic denial into the 21st century’. I’m suggesting the following:
• Plant seeds of hope in the indigenous population by getting out-of-work actors to be ‘professional people’ travelling on buses.
• Environmental improvement stickers fixed everywhere, erroneously confirming that improvements have been made.
• Tackle social development with extra, wholly fictitious, members of the social development team.
• Pump-flood the shopping centre with ‘fragrances of success’, e.g. sushi, cologne, imported beer, exotic spices, new second car, private paddock.
• Build a fake extension to Shitley so it looks twice the size on Google Earth.
(Memo to Self: check when the phrase ‘into the 21st century’ is due to expire in local authority circles as a futuristic indicator.)
SATURDAY Five-a-zeitgeist theoretical football. Baggy Urban Zoomorphic Upgrade 0, Unpastoralised Rural Dreamworld 0.
SUNDAY Pretend to be in the recliner, then later actually be in it.
March 11, 2010
MONDAY I have been asked to re-imagine absolutely everything, as part of an ambitious but tentative government initiative.
The working title is Britain Plus. It aims to change the way we think about the whole environment by adjusting our ‘cultural minds’. It really is that simple.
For example, this country is awash with premium architectural content. Over the next year I’m proposing that this content be fast-tracked to World Class Architecture status. How? By putting all British buildings of merit on the BRITAIN PLUS TRAIN that’s how, details to follow. Other key points in my Britain Plus Prospectus for Change:
• Separate the definition of Architecture into two parts: ‘archi’ meaning ‘professional interest group’ and ‘tecture’ meaning ‘disposable asset’.
• Make sure our maritime heritage is properly valued, in doubloons and pieces of eight.
• Upside-down maps of Britain to encourage the Hebrides and the Isle of Wight to rethink each other.
• St Paul’s Cathedral to go ‘high definition’ in time for the Olympics.
• Identify valuable parts of Britain’s heritage with a red dot in the corner and a Britain Plus sticker.
TUESDAY Invited to ‘recession-proof’ myself by joining the Freemasons (London Architectural Division).
WEDNESDAY I’m IN. The dress code swung it for me in the end. I do look fantastic in a Gothic apron.
THURSDAY My Probationary Member’s Pack arrives. It includes a ‘Freemasonic Screwdriver’ to get you through locked doors.
FRIDAY Transport for Tamworth has at last unveiled images of my ‘slightly underground’ station on the new East Tamworth Line.
It’s taken years of pushing, niggling, redesigns, strategic sulking, threats of legal action, misunderstandings, actual legal action, financial collapse, virement of copyright, restructuring of the development team, recalibration of expectations, emotional firefighting, base-touching, pub lunches, compliance, grid-thinking, ennui and dark, dark misery to get this far.
Still, now the Offa Park transport interchange/retail/office/miscellaneous project is finished we all feel very proud. As well as being the 21st century’s first slightly underground station, it is also the most potentialised, flexibility-wise.
As well as cramming generic ‘shops’ and new-generation 3-D adverts into every available space, we’ve also put in lots of polished concrete and glass bits. In the air-rights layer above this, a PFI polyclinic and Commuters’ Wellbeing Centre. On top of that, an assortment of ‘sexy, sleek, urban, chic living spaces’.
Making the East Tamworth line slightly underground was my idea. I knew it would play well at planning. ‘We cannot match the Victorians’ reckless endeavour’ I concluded. ‘Creating an underground railway now would be historical insolence. Also, prohibitively expensive.
‘Therefore in compliance with contextual and Wikipedia-based concerns, we commend this hommage in italics to our industrial past: a slightly underground railway.
‘We think this is exactly the sort of scheme you should be approving. We took the liberty of having a conversation with Daniel, your chief executive, and he totally agreed. Best, The Development Team.’
SATURDAY A game-changing five-a-zeitgeist rhetorical football match between Parametric Wanderers and IKEA.
Under the haughty captaincy of Franz Kobbelmensch the Parametrics had a good first half, deploying sound management rhetoric ‘to deliver all the components for a high-performance contemporary life process’. Playing IKEA at their own game clearly paid off, with early goals from key players Spine and Nurb and a breathtaking late header from new signing Subdiv.
IKEA struck back in the second half, levelling the score with goals from Socker, Klippan and Ektorp-Murbo. But corporate momentum was with the IKEA team, who played their own rhetorical game right back at the Parametrics and, crucially, raised it by promising ‘to deliver all the components for a high-performance contemporary life process BUT LOOK: new lower prices, same great quality!’
This extra pressure from the 2009 Champions of the Euro Minimalist League was enough to unsettle the Parametrics, who conceded a rhetorical own goal after they took their eyes off the metaball, pronounced it ‘meatball’ by mistake, and then collapsed into a non-pluralist defensive heap.
IKEA may have won the match but the real winners are ordinary people, for whom pretentious architectural bullshit is now a rhetorical reality. Summary: the age of Form Follows Function is over, the epoch of Substance Follows Style begins.
SUNDAY Reclinerthon.
May 13, 2010
MONDAY Charles calls. I can tell immediately that this is going to be hard work. He’s got that sulky belligerence in his voice that signals A Period of Sober Reflection.
‘Why does one bother?’ he grumbles. ‘It’s just the sheer vindictiveness of these grotty little developers, seeking to alter the course of history. They’re not democratically elected, are they? Or their puffed-up, sanctimonious, tieless bloody architects. Not accountable, do you see?’
He drones on like this for 15 minutes. I am sympathetic, but still manage to order a pub lunch, go to the toilet and hold a conversation with someone else while he’s on the phone. ‘One will NOT be ignored,’ he says. As usual, he’s partly right.
TUESDAY In the morning, work up my House for an England Footballer. It has all the features you’d expect. ‘Georgebestian’ facade. Triple garage done up like a giant goal. Three lifesize gold lions having it large by the outdoor jacuzzi and so on.
Inside, however, it’s a more muted and introspective feel with flashes of gilt. A mostly dull interior with little intellectual challenge, apart from a mock-Jacobean library for the Xbox games. Overall, I’ve gone for a philosophically minimalist feel to help develop spatial awareness, especially at the back, although obviously there are plenty of trappings in the sex dungeon.
I’m interrupted by an urgent call from Snorty. Sounds like she’s ringing from the stables. Either that, or she’s out on the lash with her ‘Sex and the Countryside 2’ set again. She and ‘the girls’ have been known to bray their way through a pitcher of Cosmopolitan each.
Any chance I could pop up and see her and Charles? ‘He’s terribly down. I’m worried he might do something silly’. Oh God, you don’t mean … ‘Yes. Seriously considering announcing his pre-abdication in a special interview with Piers Bloody Morgan. Plus, the silly arse wants to dedicate the next five years to building that sodding Goon Museum of his. Come tomorrow. And bring fags.’
WEDNESDAY A relaxing journey to Gloucestershire in the back of a Royal jag. Why should I feel bad about it? I’m a taxpayer like everyone else. As HRH’s friends keep telling one another, we’re all in this together.
As the scenery slides past like an abridged Larkin poem, I can’t help thinking he was really stupid to oppose all development in London higher than the Greenwich Observatory. It’s not just the goodwill he’s forfeited, although that had built into something quite substantial.
Charles was lined up to make a special guest appearance during the Gorillaz set at Glastonbury, reading the Book of Common Prayer over some dope looped beats. But then his giggling letters to a mysterious Saudi pal known as the ‘beheadmaster’ gushed all over the media like a fractured oil pipe and he suddenly became non-ironic again.
More seriously, he’s completely undermined his own hard-won authority in the world of epic space. It’s only a year since he beat Lord Rogers in a topless wrestling match to determine who could speak for the nation on architectural matters.
As he stood there, manboobs glistening in triumph, his opponent morally vanquished and on his arse, we thought that had settled matters. At last Charles could forget all those years of everyone sniggering at his views on plant psychology and spiritual aerobics.
Now people are laughing at him again, even when he’s not doing one of his funny voices.
THURSDAY A claustrophobic day spent in what Charles is calling his ‘Downfall Bunker’ – a massive summer house dominated by the Map Room. A Dad’s Army graphic shows a plucky HRH circled by Nazi tabloids.
The fightback starts here. For a start, the similes he used in those sabotaging letters were really bad. ‘Looks like a thingy for storing CDs’ is simply not good enough when you’re taking the piss out of a Pritzker laureate.
FRIDAY Snorty and I spend most of the day smoking outside while Charles thinks up some better architectural insults. By teatime all he’s got is ‘a pornographic slug’, ‘a diseased ovary’, ‘a pile of poorly stacked bedlinen’ and ‘bit like a squashed cake or something?’
It’s going to be a long haul.
SATURDAY Epiphany. HRH should stop criticising shape of Lord Rogers’ buildings, start criticising shape of Lord Rogers.
SUNDAY Back home, leafing through Charles’ list of ad hominem insults. They’re both illegible and unprintable.
July 1, 2010
MONDAY My pop-up architecture school’s nearing completion in Godalming. It’s only there for a fortnight, so will cost a fraction of the usual intolerable seven-year mountain of debt. It incorporates a chip shop too, to show poorer students how non-elitist the plastic arts can be.
TUESDAY To Godalming for the popping-out ceremony. Access could be easier – it has been popped-up on a roundabout – but it does encourage students to engage directly with the environment (no toilets).
WEDNESDAY At last my £200 million, 46-storey Lump in Birmingham is ready for occupation. What a journey it’s been.
It was nicknamed The Lump on the planning application, more than five years ago. Partly because it resembles a glittering sugar lump, but also to plant the idea in the city council’s mind that they might want TWO Lumps at some point, to ‘sweeten’ the urban landscape. Then everything went wrong.
The neurotic, hyperactive councillor who was championing the scheme in the face of some pretty fierce apathy at city hall had a breakdown. He appeared late, and naked, at the first committee meeting, shouting about minimalism and his mother.
Then our client, The Lump-It Development Company, went bust after bankrolling a floating leisure resort for Dubai in the shape of zoo animals. The slightest disturbance from a nearby marina and that giraffe’s head was always coming off. ‘Pontoon’ and ‘luxury living’ can be difficult concepts to reconcile.
Then earlier this year the main contractor, AAAble Builders Yes We Can Ltd, went into administration by accident, thinking it was a commerical subdivision of the university sector, and remains trapped at the top of the Yellow Pages. Still, we got there in the end. Here’s what the press release says:
‘The Lump is pure dynamic form, a dream world, shimmering like a futuristic metatrope over its gutsy surroundings. The exterior features millions of tiny, magical fragments of surprised astatine, glistening in a fantastic cloak of synthetic biomass. This then gives way to a wholly unexpected interior of 388 flats, a 66-bedroom hotel, offices for the regional department of the Fraudulent Disability Investigations Agency, a car park and 9 floors of shops.’
THURSDAY Now toying with the idea of pop-up urbanism. Only because I want to print leaflets promising ‘express piazza delivery’.
FRIDAY Finish sketches for my Tamworth Museum of Bad Language. I’m hoping it will be a premier destination for the visually impaired, as there will be textured surfaces all over the place, much of the interactivity will be based on Spoken Swearing and the whole thing will probably be shit to look at anyway after the client’s taken all the good bits out.