Positive 5: Hastings - Towards a Seaside Renaissance?

 

Tidemark. Hastings. Oct. 09.

Hastings is a historically charged place: both in its rich past and its future possibilities.

Above are boats from the largest beach-moored fishing fleet in the country (a somewhat uncontested honour), which shows that the town's relationship with the sea is still strong. The history of the town provides a certain number of interesting conditions with which the new developments in Hastings will have to contend, and it remains to be seen whether they will.

Townscape. Hastings. Oct. 09.

The shorefront developments are penned in by the cliffs behind them, creating a manhattan-esque, diverse density. The various fish and chip shops, hotels, etc. press against the sea-side road though the town. There is a charming eagerness to this town, that is familiar from other nostalgia-riden seaside towns (Bognor Regis, Torquay, Penzance, Southwold).

Castle overlooking Stade. Hastings. Oct. 09

What remains of the castle watches over the beach, and the most enlivened part of the town. This strange old piece of history that is the fishing beach. It presents a real puzzle: is it a relic, or is the rest of the town impressing a second-rate modernity on this real industious enclave that is not really wanted?

 

 Winch. Hastings. Oct. 09

The fishing beach is a working environment, but one under no small amount of malaise. The system is comprised of tall net-shops, and squat winch-sheds, both constructed out of tarred-wood boards. From the winch-sheds lines of nets, boards, floats and finally boats string out toward the tide. Boats are dragged in initially by tractors, and then finally by their own winch-sheds.

Micro-disorder under overall, macro-order.

Net-Shop. Hastings. Oct. 09

These net-shops have a small, square plan, and an amazing density (even more so than the hotels squeezed by the cliffs on the other side of the road. They plunge upward to compensate for their plan, with no restriction on their height. Manhattan preceded by a small English seaside town.

Net-Shop Rooftops. Hastings. Oct. 09

These beautiful buildings are truuly the heart and manifestation of Hastings' rich history. Any future trajectories must surely start here.

Positive 4: "Where the Wild Things Are" and Convincing Dreamscapes

Where the Wild Things Are. via here

Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' recent adaptation of Maurice Sendak's perpetually popular children's story was recently released in cinemas in the UK, to a less than positive critical response (also).

Crucially where I think the critics slipped up is that they were viewing the film as simply that, a 4-dimensional piece of video art to be measured with the various methodologies usually allowed for. Where Jonze exceeds their criticisms is in his creation of a wholly believable dreamscape.

Max's world, which in the book is constructed from his bedroom, bears enough similarity to reality to be convincingly created by a dreaming subconscious. Furthermore it is a place that we all recognise, our own narratives have led us, or those we know through this dreamworld of forts, fighting and raw emotion. I would go so far as to say that what Jonze has tried to recreate is not exactly the book, but a microcosm of childhood. In my opinion he has succeeded in this, despite being an adult, and that the temporal nature of this dreamscape increases its ability to deliver us from the everyday and allows us to see in it a child's elastic view of time.

In dreams our concepts of time, emotion, even objects and the normal are wholly warped, just as they were as children. Jonze's film with its quickly fluctuating relationships, and drastically divergent (yet spatially adjacent) climates fits both with the worlds we know from dreams and from our childhoods.

So Where the Wild Things Are has succeeded (as Jonze has done before in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) to create for us, that most elusive of goals, a positive escape into his film.

Positive 3: New Galleries at the V&A by MUMA

V&A by MUMA. London. Dec. 09.

Walking through MUMA's first gallery at the V&A I was struck with a sense of jamais vu. For whilst the concept is one of the street of an Italian city, this interior streetscape lacks anything like the reality of a street, and is more of a gated cul-de-sac than public piazza. However, as far as I am concerned this is relatively forward thinking curation on the part of the V&A: the idea that you might begin to contextualise museum objects does make their display profoundly experiential. Doors become something you walk through, balconies are experienced as such. There is one room in particular where the subtle atmospheres of the architecture create a very tangible sense of firstly a domestic, and subsequently a more public, context for the displays. In one room we can see a harpsichord by a window, surrounded by crockery and with a hearth embedded in one wall (the physical integration of the exhibits - whilst not always detailed so successfully, is very key to the methodology of MUMA here); we can walk from here back out to the first gallery which we may now view from the vantage of a balcony, and instantly the change in scale gives the effect of a transfer from inside to outside.

V&A by MUMA. Medieval space. London. Dec. 09.

The other exciting piece of architectural potential that MUMA have managed to reveal is the interstitial spaces between the glazed brick main galleries, and the rest of the building. These patchwork spaces are much tighter than the first few galleries and yet have high walls and a glass roof, in one of the best recreations of 'real' street that I think I have seen.

MUMA first came to my attention with their extension to Newlyn Art Gallery, near Penzance, and the material and curatorial sensitivities that they showed in that highly expectant environment have continued to come across in their latest venture.

 

Newlyn Art Gallery extension by MUMA. via here

Positive 2: Cycling in the City

HHstyle by Tadao Ando. Found by bicycle. Tokyo. Sep. 07

Is walking in the city to be replaced?

In cities that are being subsumed by green efforts to get people to cycle (CityBike in Copenhagen, Velib in Paris, etc.), perhaps our descriptions should be taking this into acount. We should stop thinking of the city in automotive or pedestrain terms, and take a bicycle-bound perspective to our urban interrogations. What would Reyner Banham say? Imagine the highways of Los Angeles, thick with cyclists, sweeping over each other in epic mile-long pelotons.

There is a poetry of discovering a city by bicycle. The cyclist sees everything, goes everywhere; stops, starts at will. You are not a slave to your automobile like those driving through the city, and you are able to exploit that all-pervading city terrain: the road, unlike those on foot.
The city is at your feet, pump up your tyres, and go.

Positive 1: On the city.

Joy in the face of the city. London. Nov. 09

The city is "an immense laborator[y] of trail and error"

-Jane Jacobs - "the Life and Death of American Cities"

Perhaps the contemporary city has had enough.

It's had enough of your self-congratulatory deconstruction, complaints and verbose whingeing. It's time to be positive.

We love the city here at positive urban adventure. We love the conflicts it creates, those places at the meeting of personal trajectories. The recycling of a piece timber from a bin in Islington, to a tabletop in Hackney: not so much for the act, but for the meeting of narratives it symbolises.

Consider: Family fixing a hole in their floor rig up a temporary piece of flooring; it serves it's purpose, the builders arrive and they throw it out. A group walks past, notice the flooring, which to them is a table, and they carry it home to spill wine over.

Perhaps this is not the best story, but it is one that begins to illustrate the connected complexity that makes us positive about the city. That made us start this blog.

Welcome to our positive urban adventure.