Positive 10: CentrePoint, West.

CentrePoint. London. March. 10.

Here's a walk that we undertook, in the interests of both an article and for a small amount of education, through Soho. At this point it is mostly just a photo essay. To begin with we made our point of embarkation (in this case from the number 55 bus) Central London's navigational Milion: Richard Seifert's Centre Point. Its name provided us with a suitable starting point, if somewhat ironic as apparently the right to build it came from providing a useful automobile junction being built underneath it. However with the proposed Crossrail works pedestrians may be able to claim this point back soon, as part of the increasingly walkable area of London.

 Chinatown Pak Choi. London. March. 10.


Our first foray outward lead us through Chinatown, and in particular down those tiny streets inhabitated by a collapse of pallets and trolleys outside those small vegetable shops like the one above.

Frescoe. London. March. 10.


One of the first objectives on our trek was the Notre Dame de France church on Leicester Place, where an early 20th Century Beaux Arts concoction. It was of particular interest for the artworks inside: a mosaic by the Russian Boris Anrep (above) and a mural by Jean Cocteau, the polymathic French artist. Both Anrep and Cocteau are colossal figures in European intellectual culture and the audience they garnered on this Saturday morning was a little disappointing, so please make the pilgrimage.
 

Camera Fayre. London. March. 10.


We set back off into Soho heading West toward Golden Square. I spied this CCTV garlanded with coloured ribbon (presumably a vestige from some previous event), and found the anachronism pleasing and jolly.

"RevueBar". London. March. 10.


Apparently London's first strip bar lies dormant and wanting, a sign of both the declining decadence and increasing commercialism of Soho.

Canaletto. London. March. 10.


A house on Broadwick Street which bore Canaletto when he moved to London to be closer to the English gentlemen who patronised his tireless views of Venice.

Espresso + Gravadlax. London. March. 10.

One of the major points on our journey was Nordic Bakery, a delightful (and delectable) eatery that oozed with good taste (real good taste not the faded romantic roccoco rubbish that passes for taste in near-east London). The detailing went from the Aalto chairs to the gravadlax, right down to the denim aprons on the typically blonde staff.

Almost ex-embassy. London. March. 10.

Our final objective and the one that marked the move from the quietening streets of Soho to the very quieted streets of Mayfair was Eero Saarinen's American Embassy. Or as we recently found, Eero Saarinen's soon to be ex-embassy (Kieran Timberlake's design for the new Vauxhall pad can be seen here). Which raises the interesting question of what this Grade II listed building will become when they move out. Perhaps just an office building, or some culturally mundane institution, but perhaps the US should use it (an example of an American bringing something great to Britain as an outpost for welcoming. An anti-embassy? Somewhere where we can learn that America is not just a lardy hillbilly state, and that it perhaps has something to discuss with the rest of the planet. This anti-embassy should be an outpost for all that is good that is American.

Positive 9: Hackney to Greenwich

 

Bethnal Green Gasometers. London. March. 10.


It is time for us to strike out for the territory, and chart lines across the capital in a manner that might live up to the title of this blog. The first real Urban Adventure takes the form of a walk from Kingsland Road, Hackney, to Greenwich.

We chose this route for its scenery - the route we take uses both Regent's Canal (or partly doesn't as we shall see), and the Thames Path. It forges a pictaresque route through some of the most diverse (socialogically/geographically/architecturally) parts of London.

Regents Canal, near Victoria Park. London. March. 10.


Quickly, after mounting the canal just before it is crossed by the shining new Overground line, the route had to be rethought. Regent's Canal affords (at least in some parts, currently, although as the Islington to New North Road stretch testifies, it is quickly being capatilised upon) some of the most revealing backyard glimpses of both lives and neighbourhoods. It cuts through the terraces and light industry, allowing them to spill inward toward the canal: to embrace its open-ness. The stretch of the canal alongside Victoria Park is currently undergoing major work and this allows us to catch a glimpse of its reality, the shuttered concrete walls, sluggish silty bottom, and floating traffic cones that lie beneath the normally attractive surface.

This gruesome striptease is a wonderful spectacle, and one that has revealed further appreciation in us toward the canal.

Regents Canal, near Mile End park. London. March. 10.

The slopes falling toward the canal around Mile End Park are the results of some very obvious and intentiona regenereation. Although quite who for is unknown, perhaps the sectre of the Olympic Delivery authority looms low over this stretch and this could account for such "Dutch" spectacles as the above bridge.

Graduate Centre, by Surface Architects. London. March. 10.

This Surface designed building for Queen Mary's University has an interesting and complex formal relationship to the canal, and this goes some way to explaining its somewhat scale-less form. The most exciting part of its design is the opening next to the building, it opens the space  beyond to the canal, and the canal becomes less cut-like, less linear. This is the sort of urban move that could invigorate and invite the canal into the city.

Roundabout Sculpture, Canary Wharf. London. March. 10.

The canal leads into the Limehouse Basin, where we have to break from it, and attempt to join the Thames Path, which leads us across the Isle of Dogs. A highly disparate pedestrian experience, one that takes us from corporate urbanism to empty 90s residential blocks. The route breaks from the vast expanses of the Thames-side walk, to the tight and place-less spaces further into the interior of the Isle.

Millwall to Canary Wharf. London. March. 10.

The above photograph expresses to us the discontinuity of the Isle of Dogs, and its disparity between the semi-detached suburbs of Millwall to the high-rise of Canary Wharf. Whether or not this stretches to a more troubled London relationship with towers or not, or if it is a ore local situation is hard to say.

Greenwich Tunnel, looking South. London. March. 10.

The suburbs of Millwall give way to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, which on the weekend that the Thames Tunnel was open before it became a branch of the Overground, was an enticing prospect. The archaic lift, with its genial supervisor, leads you to this eery and antiquarian stretch of Victoriana. This bizarre place leads us up into the heartland of tourist Greenwich, an incongrous transition, but one soon left behind, striking out to the South and East.

Positive 8: Bexhill-On-Sea; Lost Modernism

Coming across the De La Warr Pavilion (by Eric Mendelsohn) in Bexhill-On-Sea is, and one imagines always has been for visitors to the town, startling. The pavilion has, in the best traditions of the International Style, muscled in on a pleasing British seaside vernacular with little apparent considerations to its context.

However, it gives those who constantly plea for a contextual architecture something to think about. The building sits uneasily amongst onion-domed arcades and apartments (see below), but to whose detriment?

 Apartments. Bexhill. Feb. 10.


The stylistic unease that the opposing buildings generate, does not diminish our enjoyment of either. For they are both joyous in their own manner.

 Pavilion. Bexhill. Feb. 10.

I do not mean to suggest that buildings should always be built in disregard of their context, but certainly stylistic continuity as is so wonderfully disregarded here, need not be a driver for designers. Far more pressing is the need to create buildings that fulfill functions for the community, work well, and that are pleasing to those that inhabit them and the society as a whole. These buildings, it seems, fulfill all of these objectives (ignoring the locals objections to both buildings' programmatic problems).

On a somewhat tangential note, particular wonder must be expressed at the wonderful stair of the pavilion. Jutting out of the Modern box, in a grand dialogue with the English channel (no Grimshaw-like pirate ships for Mendelsohn) the stair spirals around a sculptural light fitting. Any architect past or present would love to have something this eloquent to their name, contextual or no.

 

Pavilion stair. Bexhill. Feb. 10.

Pavilion light. Bexhill. Feb. 10

Positive 7: Concrete Island

Concrete Island. London. Jan 10

JG Ballard's "Concrete Island" offers a section of the Westway as a Crusoe's desert island for one unfortunate architect. Yet despite this dystopian vision, it gives rise to more positive speculation. Namely what are the potentials of inhabiting the leftover infrastructural spaces of cities? Railways have already (and to some extent always were) occupied in the form of viaduct arch inhabitation. As an automobile (or even post-automobile) generation, perhaps we should consider moving into the middle of our roads and left-over automobile spaces.

Let us take the car on in its own domain, let's move in.

Positive 6: The Monument

Momument. London. Jan. 10.

A doric column built to commemerate the tragedy of the Great Fire of 1666. The doric column was drawn from various ideas born of the fruitful imagination of Britain's very own Baroque polymath powerhouse: Sir Christopher Wren.  Built in 1677 it contains within its construction a wonderful riposte to Venturi's monument.

Monument via here, via Venturi / Denise Scott Brown.

Venturi declared that the best, and most efficient, monument is one that houses programme in a dumb box, and has a giant sign atop it declaring: "I am a monument".

Wren's column, is a tower whose height is equal to its distance from the fire. It is a landmark in two senses: navigational and symbolic. His column is not purely decorational, it is an observation tower for the curious. Ackroyd tells us it was a favourite to those tired with London, hurling themselves from its height.

Most importantly Wren was a president of the Royal Society and a keen astronomer. The monument represents their experimentation together: it is was intended as a Zenith telescope, as well as a device for various other expirements. To this end the cantilevered spiral stair spirals around a void that terminates at the bottom end in a minute laboratory, and at the top end at the hinged top of the crowning urn, and beyond, the heavens.

This symbiotic relationship between landmark/monument and instrument/observation (a duck? - no, a camoflauge duck - an exact and precise building, ornamented to serve several functions) makes this building a wonderful piece of architecture. It is a building to progress human and scientific endevaour, to conquer natural distasters, and to kickstart a modern London. Wren was already envisaging a complexity of construction that was post-post-modern in the 17th Century. I think it's about time we caught on.

Base of the Monument - tiny entrance. London. Jan. 10.

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.