architectural dialogue

Is London a creative city?

Ken, are you going mad? Of course it is – we all know the answer to that!

But doesn’t everyone say that about the city they live in – New York, Paris, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Hong Kong ….? I love the place, but … Perhaps people elsewhere don’t feel this way, but surely all inhabitants of metropoli live parochial lives? In London, we’re all in our little ‘villages’ – which once were real and are now a set of overlapping living zones within personal lives: part real, part virtual; where we eat, sleep, work, shop, have lunch, take the kids to play … My ‘village’ is real in being Highgate, virtual a possibly fewer ways than I like to flatter myself. When I head out it is usually to the West End: Soho, Covent Garden, Holborn … and, of course, to the dreaded land of bankers, the City, and to the East End. Why? Well, principally because this is where the architectural interest is. Most of West London – around and beyond Hyde Park – hardly interests me. In truth, I have to force myself to go there and see what has been going on (architecturally, usually, very little). …

I suppose much of that derives from the experiences of a 14 year old flaneur who, visiting London for the first time, was allowed to wander off on his own.

‘Good grief! What kind of parents were they?’

Ah, but what a gift to a son who could wander and wonder among the streets of Soho, peeking in at the exotic novelties of coffee bars and expresso machines … That’s when I learned the strange pleasure of just moving about, on my own, soaking it up, thrilled by the role I had cast myself in … And yet, of course, I had little or no idea what was going on! Anyway, come to think of it, yes, I used to do that in Newcastle … There’s just something about being anonymous in a thriving city …

‘Gosh, what a sad bugger you are …’

Amanda Levete facade, in a dingy alley off east Oxford Street

Sad? Hey, I still enjoy doing this … It’s all very ordinary. I recall a late sunny, summer evening a couple of years ago when, on a Friday evening, about 6pm, I left a group of Russian architects after visiting a Japanese ad agency located in Soho (behind that wonderful Amanda Levete facade off Oxford Street). The Russians wanted to hit Bond Street and shop … So I walked off through Soho down toward the River and across Hungerford Bridge to the SouthBank, where my dear beloved awaited me (well, not really: she’s always late …). It was glorious: a scene of people moving about, shopping, crowding the pavements outside pubs (a comparatively recent London fashion with only something incidental to do with smoking). shoppers, people coming out for the evening and having a pre-theatre meal … all that mix. It was nothing special. Nothing happened … well, London was happening! There was a buzz in the air – a buzz that begins to build up around then, after the summer holidays, when an Autumn ‘season’ is beginning. I was 14 again. Of course, it wasn’t the same London. OK, it was, but it wasn’t … We’re back to place, character and patterns again. God, I sometimes love the place …

‘Sometimes?’

Well,  back to that question: is this a great place to live and is London creative? It used to be. it seemed to be when I was younger and has lived on that reputation ever since … I just keep coming across things happening elsewhere and thinking: hey, whey not in London? Do you know there were some ad agency awards in New York recently and London won zero – absolutely b=nothing from what I understand … And, architecturally … hell, the years from about 1994/5 to 2008 were boom years … There’s d been nothing like it: so much work, so many architects, such good salaries and project budgets … But look about  … Sure, there’s lots of good stuff, but there should be more , lots more …

At which point in writing this I have been interrupted by a dear friend who lives in Cologne – a marketing man who is crazy about contemporary architecture! He makes me envious: he travels all over western Europe from Cologne. It is easy for him! Here, in London, we are strangely trapped. It can take 2 hours cross by car and always 45-60 minutes to go anywhere even around the corner! Ever since the Middle Ages the average speed of movement has been about 10-11 miles per hour. … So we talked, about Cologne and Dusseldorf, and Stuttgart, Berlin and Brussels and all those places and all the new architecture going on within some 500 kilometres of Cologne. Then we said good bye: it was time for each of us to get on. For me, it is time to use up that 45 minutes getting to a meeting in, of course, the West End … and to do so without having completed dealing with that question: is London a creative city?  (What is a ‘creative city’ anyway?)

I have just woken up to the fact that I haven’t looked at this blog in months! Apologies, but I’m trying to get Volume One (yes, two volumes!) of this book, Meetings With Buildings, completed and (as always) it’s taking longer than it should. In other words: I’m switching from Pages to InDesign, adding images, checking text and footnotes, correcting … It goes on. And then (again, as always) one adds and alters … and weeks go by. Strange.

I sat on a bus the other day and spoke with a PhD student who asked what I was up to. That’s always a question guaranteed to draw a defensive answer. ‘What am I up to? I wanted to say: I’ve little idea! … I’ll tell you when I complete the work!’ If I was also doing a PhD I perhaps could have given him something: some indication of the topic, line of argument, angle of approach, perhaps even an abstract (the work is, after all, almost complete). But it’s not like that. I’m not like most authors, certainly not the academic kind: we don’t want to discuss work in progress. We don’t know what we’re doing until we’ve done it. That’s the point of writing!

Defensiveness or superstition? … So, where am I? Well, nearing the end of Volume One, but I recently had to get my head around an aspect of Charles ‘Santiago’ Sanders Peirce’s work – wonderful, ill-fated character whom I imagine having been a great influence on Bucky Fuller (actually, I have no idea if that was the case; they were a generation apart …Peirce woud have had an explanation). Peirce: the latest hero. There has been one after the other. I become engrossed, fascinated … Peirce would probably turn to the word ‘Musement’. ‘Bemusement, perhaps’? There appears to have been a line of these characters: Gadamer, Aristotle, Falk, Eagleton, Dunn, Kant, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, of course … Cassirer, Bataille … I loose track … I become enchanted, I pursue … and then I come to the same conclusion: they all say the same thing and avoid saying another same thing – all of which is OK. I’m, as they say, cool with that. It’s the academic that are the worst. Have you ever thrown yourself into batteries of academic journals? So many of them are merely fodder to a university ratings endeavour, focusing upon the minute differences between one doctrine of philosophical viewpoint and another, blind to the fact that the vast body of what is being examined is the same as … whatever. Ah, but that’s the point, Ken! … Is it? Is not the myriad of nuanced differences of viewpoint and articulation that is so fascinating, but rather the vast body of commonality. In any case, one always returns to a ‘So what?’ question: ‘What has this got to do with the price of eggs when one get out of bed in the morning?’ It should be a lot. It usually isn’t. Few philosophers get beyond the architectonics of their philosophical schema to such an obvious concern … As for the academics, well … It all takes me back to my days in the AA when private ruminations brought me to disclose these to a tutor … I was excited; he was bored: ‘Ken, so what …?’ Dreadful teaching technique, but at least I still remember the lesson learned. Of course, there is no answer to that particular interrogative … So what? For whom? In what situation?

Ah, now I’m being Aristotlian, bring it all down to earth! It always comes back to that … that, and my hang-up about neo-Platonism. They say one is either a Platonist or an Aristotlian.

In my youth I spent many a year under the tutelage of an ardent Platonist. I’ve met with him again – about three times in a year after some 25 years of no contact. How peculiar. How strange, too, to love someone and have the deepest respect for them, and yet to disagree with them – to profoundly disagree. He walks with princes-in-waiting in the gardens of stately homes. They whisper about ‘divine rights’ and other such things that arouse my republican sentiments. It’s terribly difficult to disgaree with such people. They laugh. They say one doesn’t understand. And they get upset. … It’s an argument one can’t win. Perhaps I don’t want to win. On the other hand, I must: he’s adopts a Platonisc viewpoint and I adopt an Aristotlian one. Actually, he dismisses all philosophy and I am like a hungry animal anxiously in search of … of what? Of, I suppose, an answer to that ‘So what?’ retort…. So what? How can an esoteric teacher dismiss philosophy? How could he not …

How many books has this man written? is it 12? 15? I don’t know …. Strangely, he reminds me somewhat of  someone else who must have published about as many books, but works of self-promotion. he sent me yet another the other day. I wanted to politely thank him, sincerely congratulate him and wish him well. But, in truth, I felt disappointed by a man who, in his mid-seventies-plus, is still lost to a vain obsession with significance. How sad when the mature around one found to be locked into such concerns ….
Another recollection: it was on this architect’s desk that I once saw a note he had written to himself. It was three words: survival, success, significance … Architects struggle with the first, but one can get by on very little. There’s always the dole and the Big Issue keeping a lot of people going. Many are even content with that. Success is not so easy an appetite to satisfy. A lot more is at stake. Nevertheless, many people reach a point of relative satisfaction and ease off at some point. However, the pursuit of significance is different. It eats a person up. There can never be enough of it! And that is what this architect hungers for: yet more significance … How sad. Does he think it will give him credential at the Pearly Gates? I wanted to tell him that, sometimes, ‘less is more’ (he’d hate that!) and that (as Bataille might have advised) one’s concern should be with sovereignty. But he’s a knight of the realm. Who am I?… Like that teacher, he would retort: ‘Ken, you don’t understand …’ Perhaps I don’t. Perhaps that is why I get out of my bed in the morning and look at my screen and type away and read and type and revise and read …

What’s the itch I’m scratching? My own pursuit of significance? Ostensibly, it’s a concern with a simple interrogative: What is architecture all about? What a silly question. It’s like asking ‘What is cooking all about?’ Watch Masterchef and one might find out. Cook a few meals and learn. Experience a few buildings and you might come to know. Go to an architecture school and … (Just don’t sit looking at photographs. They lies!) … Will one learn? It’s intriguing: one learns in spite of … One reads between the lines. One’s best teachers nod and wink and point a finger … and they say ‘Do you get it? Now, do you … Do you?’ That Qaballa teacher is a bit like that. I imagine him asking, and laughing, like some mad Buddhist monk … He’s a mischievous bugger! I recall (yet again) an second-year tutor something like that, viz., saying ‘do you get it?’. He thought I did get it. ‘I turned you on, didn’t I?’ he said, in a self-congratulatory tone. ‘Turned me on’? What a wonderful phrase! Well, as it happened he hadn’t. I had just been temporarily shunted down a side track. Like most people, am still looking for the key that ‘turns me on’. If there has been any degree of ‘turning on’ it has been because of my wife. Her advice was always simple: ‘Look’, she’d advise, ‘get out there, walk the pavements … Find your own discourse and learn a degree of scepticism re the received architectural one.’ I suppose she taught me to distrust the mediated experience. It invariably lies.

But what is it that I experience? What is it that I find out there, on the pavements, that turns me on? … (No, not that – I’m an architect, remember? What’s that joke about the man bleeding to death and someone else needing a pencil in order to tighten a tourniquet? The latter asks an architect who answers: ‘Ehmm, would a 2B be good enough?’

I sometimes get excited when reading rather than looking – not always, but occasionally. Sometimes an author says something that connects, that somehow seems to make sense of some inarticulated inner feeling that is all garbled and mixed up and … and suddenly it is coherent and … it’s as if, as one philosopher said, one had walked into a lightened room. ‘Hey, who switched the lights on?’ It’s as if one already knew but didn’t know that one knew … and the book somehow les one know that one does know! How strange … But then it goes – rather quickly … Did architecture ever do that for me? Not a lot. But, yes, sometimes, and powerfully  … What I catch I often refer to as masterful gamesmanship. I think Peirce would have known what I meant. Do I? Well, yes, of course … (I’m smiling …) The difficulty is not an lack of inner certainty but some way to articulate it – ironically, always knowing that such an articulation will always be somewhat off target: yet another pointing finger. ‘Look … see … Do you get it? Do you …?’

OK, so you still want to know what I’m writing about? In a nutshell: I’m asking ‘what is architecture?’ This can’t be answered except in the usual cliched terms. But one can, more usefully, ask ‘What is an architect?’ Then one returns the issue to its human basis and to what Geoffrey Scott referred to as ‘the world as man would have it’ – or rather to the endeavour which this entails. That’s all. I’m trying to avoid one of those Victorian phrenetic exercises that presume the pattern of bumps on someone’s head tells us something about that person’s character – that’s what most books on architecture do: this and building, this and that style, period, hero, etc…. Pevsner was a bit like that: ‘No, 27 cable Street: Doric columns, tall windows, four storeys, broken pediment …’ We can see that! So, I’m asking, looking, ruminating about what is going on when an architect gets out of bed in the morning, pointing like there is no tomorrow … It’s very Aristotlian. Plato wouldn’t be interested. …