Live in the Moment

My job takes me to each pole of the world of the ordinary; from the dirt and squalor described in numerous posts below, to the most wonderful and beautiful places, soothing to the soul; some of them make me sigh with happiness and the joy of being alive in that particular moment. It can happen in the most unexpected of places.

My client, a successful businessman and rather a difficult character to deal with, wanted a new building to cover his swimming pool. We had already been through numerous designs and I was beginning to wonder if I would ever produce something he liked, when he sent me a magazine with a photo of a beautiful oak framed studio in it. He wanted something just like it – could I go and speak to the timber people – sort it out – get him a quote for the timber and a design by the end of the month. Pleased that he had made some kind of a decision, but anxious that I would not get it finished in time, I rang the timber yard. They were specialists in the area and built new structures of oak and made furniture and fittings of any timber you care to name, as long as it was from a ‘sustainable source – we feel very strongly about that’, said the man on the phone. His accent was curious – I was used to local accents of all kinds when ringing suppliers or builders, but his was odd in its correct BBC received pronounciation. He sounded like one of the older newsreaders. He was not just any old carpenter. To cut a long story short, I was invited to look around the yard.

Very early in the morning, I drove down some tiny lanes and a track to a collection of sheds and barns in the middle of the county. It was slightly chilly, full of the scents of early flowers and the sounds of birds shouting their heads off; there was that clear, cold, crystalline light of a sunny morning in the spring, the kind that promises a beautiful day but often deteriorates into showers.

I parked the car next to a fence made of chestnut palings and walked through a covered gateway, like a lych gate, made from small roundings of timber with the bark removed – the waste from felling and preparing a trunk of timber for use. The main office housed the design team, all sat at computers or poring over drawings, producing designs for timber frames of oak, chestnut and laminated timber, in all styles from medieval cruck frames to the space frames similar to those over the Eden project. Every computer was leaning slightly one way or another – the desks were made from huge planks of oak, seasoned in situ and warped out of shape. They were polished by use only – there was no kind of wax or other finish on them. One man sat tapping away on the keyboard with a mug of tea next to him. I watched him pick it up and noticed that the coaster was a thin sliver from a round branch, with a little split in it like a pie slice, where it had dried out.

In the conference room, I met the director across a table made from a single huge slab of elm, from what must have been a giant of a tree. We sat on benches, huge and rustic with great pegs of oak holding them together. The floor was of planks of ash, the window frames were green oak, the roof was of A frames, beautifully jointed. Everything was slightly or greatly warped and nothing was level. I have never seen such a woody, wonky place; all useful, all strangely beautiful.

We went out into the framing yard. A tall man was cutting a complicated joint into the end of a great piece of oak, as part of an enormous wall frame, all laid out flat and numbered, ready to be taken apart and packed onto a lorry to take to the site. The low sun glittered off the drops of dew and the bright blade of the chisel; picked out the saw marks on the sides of the great timbers; cast stripes of deep shade across a pile of bright, honey coloured new timber lying in stick, ready to be cut and shaped. A light wind brought that wonderful sharp smell of freshly cut timber across the yard, coupled with a whiff of good coffee from the canteen.

I sighed with contentment. It was one of those moments.

Human Monstrosity

Well, I was going to stay out of this topic as it has been the subject of much heated debate and angst amongst fellow architects lately, but here goes.

This is Robin Hood Gardens, a large block of flats designed by the Smithsons in the late Sixties. I won't bore you with the history of the Modern movement, but let us just say it is one of the last gasps of a kind of architecture that seemed a good idea at the time, and thoroughly up-to-the-minute in the early 20th century. It started with the likes of Le Corbusier and other, well known and feted architects who were very good at designing chairs and houses made of concrete slabs with floor to ceiling glass windows. I know I'm being simplistic, but a history of modern architecture is not the point of this post.

By the time we reach the late Sixties and start that decade that taste forgot, the Seventies, such buildings were beginning to look a little.... dated. They were built to house a lot of people, as cheaply as possible; mainly at the expense of small, normal sized houses, each with little gardens, which of course were simply not on if you were a) a member of a right on London council, or b) an architect. Put these two together and...

The architect produces wonderful drawings and models, colourwashed perspectives showing a glowing building on a sunny day, with shiny happy people skipping and leaping along the 'streets in the sky' (the police officers among you will know them as booby traps for perps to chuck bricks from). Around the foot of the great edifice are swathes of green lawns, public gardens, trees and even a little pond. The architect puffs up, full to the brim with the vigour that the Modernist religion gives him, whilst his supplicants, the Council officers, gasp with astonishment at such vision.

The following year, the Council finish their 'consultation', where they ask locals whether or not they want their little terraced houses destroyed to make way for the monolith in the picture. Whether they do or not, the outcome is predetermined. Everything is levelled and construction begins in earnest, the thing built quickly out of huge slabs of concrete and shortly, the residents are moved in. At first, all is well. Running water! A bathroom! A window with a view! Light!

Skip forwards to our own dark times.

The British weather is not kind to concrete, and it is stained with dark streaks from rain and dirt. Bits are beginning to deteriorate and the wet is getting to the reinforcement, blowing off the concrete cover, causing more damage. The gardens, maintained for only a couple of years by the council before the budget was spent on Diversity Awareness Officers, are now havens for fly tippers, perverts and gangs of hoodies. The dark, graffitted corridors and stairwells stink of wee, and shifty looking men and youths push drugs, knives and guns. The windows leak and the place is impossible to heat effectively. The lifts are never working, and the young mother has to pull her childs buggy, shopping and baby up five floors - she daren't leave something behind for another trip as it will be stolen the minute she turns her back. Most of the front doors have bars across them. The streets in the sky are great for yobs to throw things at the neighbours, the police, the ambulance staff, the postman and whoever else is trying to carry out their normal business.

The very form of such buildings does not exactly encourage crime, as it is people, not architecture, who perpetrate it, but the design does make it a lot easier for those whose main mission in life is to make things miserable for others, or who think of nothing but their next fix and their next miserable little petty crime.

This building was due to be demolished and there was an outcry from the architectural profession (not all of them, I hasten to add) and a campaign to get the horrible thing listed. Listed! As an important architectural statement, as something to be held up as a good example of its kind! English Heritage carried out an inspection and report and decided that no, it is not a good example of its kind.

I think it should be recorded in a film or animated 'fly through' to warn architecture students how not to do it. Whether they will listen or not remains to be seen.