Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

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Architecture by accountants

It seems I find myself in the role of Ellsworth M. Toohey, though my opponent is no Howard Roark.  As if to make real the abstractions of my last post, I’ve since become aware of a campaign to preserve another of the West End’s few remaining green spots from rapacious developers who know the price of everything and the value of nothing: this time on the charming Otago Lane, just round the corner from this little beauty.

In this case I’m in the strange position of being friendly with one of the architects involved, a fellow clubman.  His view is that he is only obeying orders: that as an architect he is merely responding to the developer’s wishes, that the developer in turn is merely responding to market forces, and that the Council will surely follow correct procedure in determining the outcome of the application.  We could counter that not every profession thrives on inflicting stress on individuals, communities and small businesses; but the wider point is that the buckpassing inherent in the system makes the angry local response inevitable.  The reasonable perception is that the planning process is opaque and extremely complicated (would it be that hard for the Council or the developers to put plans online, or to make them available in person outside office hours?), that money talks (developers can appeal and resubmit indefinitely, objectors get one go at it), and that the views of residents and locals are therefore routinely ignored.

The nimby gets blamed for a lot of things: top of the list these days is helping global warming by opposing wind farm developments.  I don’t mind the sight of wind farms myself; they aren’t beautiful, and the companies proposing them might have fewer enemies if they worked a bit on their aesthetics, but they aren’t that bad.  They might play a useful though minor role in our conversion to clean energy, and unlike almost all other development they could be easily removed with no permanent damage, but I can understand country folk not wishing to see their own natural environment further bespoiled to feed the power-hungry urban beast.  I wouldn’t object if someone wanted to build one near me; but attacking nimbies because of wind farms is missing the point: if community opposition were as effective against Tesco and Scottish Coal as it is against Vestas, we wouldn’t need wind farms to reduce our CO2 emissions, because the out-of-town shopping centres, motorway extensions and coal-fired power stations which have brutalised our environment would never get built in the first place.  It’s not enough for environmentalists, or leftists, or David Cameron, to say they support localism and community-based decision making and want to shift power away from Whitehall, then ignore the views of those communities if they happen to be inconvenient.  Thankfully the Scottish Government have recently taken a small step in the right direction.

I’ve not yet had a chance to see the plans in question in this case (other than a very blurry cameraphone shot) but by all accounts they are not sympathetic to ‘the Glasgow style’.  By contrast, have a look at these new flats at the top of Great George St -

Nothing spectacular – perhaps the rooms are a bit pokey – but nothing offensive or out of place either: and no community backlash, disproving the developers’ cliché that people are instinctively scared of change or against all development.  As for the other local campaigns I’ve followed for the last couple of years: Save the Botanic Gardens Garage has been successful in rescuing the fine art nouveau façade of Britain’s earliest garage; local godfather Stefan King will not be able to build a nightclub in those same Botanic Gardens thanks to determined grassroots activism; but the campaign to Stop Tesco Owning Partick seems doomed to failure sooner or later.

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Fanfare for the uncommon man

One of the best things about the spectre of economic and environmental collapse is that journalism’s apocalyptic pornographers are back in the ascendant.  Dystopian propheteering fills the dying newspapers; as Orwell put it: “I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.”  This piece casts geoengineering in the Bladerunner aesthetic, and I enjoyed this one so much I’ve now linked to it here twice.  The last paragraph is striking:

I often wonder what people will think decades from now if they are able to view those old Doris Day and Rock Hudson comedies of the mid 20th century.  Invariably these stories took place in a Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers, and streets full of cars with tail fins, and companies that ruled the world, and men and women who had come back from a World War full of confidence that there was no limit to what people with good intentions could do and nothing that they couldn’t handle.  We are their children and grandchildren and it is a different world now.

It sure is.  Our lot is pessimism, and anyone who isn’t pessimistic has his head in the sand (possibly literally if he’s a young British soldier sent to Helmand).  At best we can copy Orwell’s resigned stoicism: in Coming Up For Air, presaging the Blitz on the eve of WWII, he wrote:

Whichever way you cross London it’s twenty miles of houses almost without a break.  Christ!  How can the bombers miss us when they come?  We’re just one great big bull’s-eye.  And no warning, probably.  Because who’s going to be such a bloody fool as to declare war nowadays?  If I was Hitler I’d send my bombers across in the middle of a disarmament conference.  Some quiet morning, when the clerks are streaming across London Bridge, and the canary’s singing, and the old woman’s pegging the bloomers on the line – zoom, whizz, plonk!  Houses going up into the air, bloomers soaked with blood, canary singing on above the corpses… If you come to think of it, in the whole of England at this moment there probably isn’t a single bedroom window from which anyone’s firing a machine-gun.  But how about five years from now?  Or two years?  Or one year?

So it turned out.  A Britain already in a terrible state enjoyed a last hurrah then declined some more; this could have been written 70 or even 100 years ago.  But on the other side of the Atlantic, the Manhattan of sparkly new glass towers and Übermenschen took shape and was lionised in The Fountainhead, which I read the other day.  Ayn Rand’s epic laissez faire bible, recently revivified by America’s overnight transition from big government conservatism to big government socialism, is still interesting for its hardline political and philosophical views, for its abstract, sadistic love story, and for its incisive take on modernist and classical forms of architecture.

It tells the tale of an uncompromising young architect, Howard Roark, and his battles with an erudite socialist newspaper columnist.  Roark, self-made and instilled with Rand’s objectivist ideals (borrowed from Nietzsche, whom she quotes approvingly in her introductory essay) rejects the fashions of his peers and sets about designing his own shockingly modern buildings.  Society hates him but he triumphs in the end as the lesser men around him fall.

Some of this iconoclasm is welcome, as when Rand’s alter ego Dominique Francon, a rich journalist and Roark’s lover, goes to live in a slum tenement for a story, then reports back on the experience first to a dinner party of wealthy landlords:

“The house you own on East Twelfth Street, Mrs Palmer,” she said, her hand circling lazily from under the cuff of an emerald bracelet too broad and heavy for her thin wrist, “has a sewer that gets clogged every other day and runs over, all through the courtyard.  It looks blue and purple in the sun, like a rainbow.”  “The block you control for the Claridge estate, Mr Brooks, has the most attractive stalactites growing on all the ceilings,” she said, her golden head leaning to her corsage of white gardenias with drops of water sparkling on the lusterless petals…

then to a meeting of social workers:

She stood in the speaker’s pulpit of an unaired hall and looked at a flat sheet of faces, faces lecherously eager with the sense of their own virtue.  She spoke evenly, without inflection.  She said, among many other things: “The family on the first floor rear do not bother to pay their rent, and the children cannot go to school for lack of clothes.  The father has a charge account at a corner speak-easy.  He is in good health and has a good job.  The couple on the second floor have just purchased a radio for sixty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents cash.  In the fourth floor front, the father of the family has not done a whole day’s work in his life, and does not intend to.  There are nine children, supported by the local parish.  There is a tenth one on its way…”  When she finished there were a few claps of angry applause.  She raised her hand and said: “You don’t have to applaud.  I don’t expect it.”  She asked politely: “Are there any questions?”  There were no questions.

So far, so good.  But uncomfortable truths soon descend into cod Gordon Gecko gibberish, as when Roark discusses maverick sculptor Steven Mallory:

“Most people say they’re concerned with the suffering of others.  I’m not.  And yet there’s one thing I can’t understand.  Most of them would not pass by if they saw a man bleeding in the road, mangled by a hit-and-run driver.  And most of them would not turn their heads to look at Steven Mallory.  But don’t they know that if suffering could be measured, there’s more suffering in Steven Mallory when he can’t do the work he wants to do, than in a whole field of victims mown down by a tank?  If one must relieve the pain of this world, isn’t Mallory the place to begin?”

A whole field of victims, eh?

For those teenagers who decide that true rebellion involves the rejection of their parents’ liberalism and their peers’ socialism, Howard Roark is a hero (albeit a uniquely gingerhaired one).  But readers describing themselves as libertarian on the basis that the man in the street knows better than the elite might be taken aback by her, and her hero’s, contempt for the common man and his mundane worldview.  Clearly she shares Kenneth Clark’s analysis that the last thousand years of Western civilisation hinged on the brilliance of a dozen or so individuals; fine, but a philosophy that glorifies a tiny share of humanity and damns the rest was unlikely ever to have the mass appeal of, say, social democracy.  Rand’s ultra-individualism was shaped by her experience of fleeing the collectivist horrors of the Soviet Union for the haven of America, but intellectually it might have been more rebellious not to go from one extreme to the other.

However, it’s easy to scoff now that modernism is old hat and the profession is dominated by Howard Roark egos like Rogers and Foster.  But on The Fountainhead’s publication in 1943 they still represented an exciting counterculture.  Would Manhattan, the 20th century’s greatest monument to modernism, have been built without determined Howard Roark types?  Would we have had great Bauhaus beauties like Tel Aviv, or even little ones like Britain’s seaside lidos?  Perhaps not.  I love these places, but they are coherent and contextualised, and I’d be just as offended by their vandalism by haphazard postmodern architecture as I am when it happens anywhere older.  As Kunstler puts it again:

The role of architect-as-supernatural-being requires the mystification of the public.  Hence, the more tortured and alienating it is, the better the building.  As city after city “bends over” for these sadistic operations, the architect takes on a persona not unlike the storied Dr Mengele of the Third Reich.

If Libeskind, Hadid and chums want to build a lasting monument to human endeavour (which I doubt) they should found a new city, rather than disfiguring all the old ones – though perhaps Rand would argue, with justification, that our statist times prevent their doing so.  What if she lived somewhere whose main asset was its heritage, and where the only new buildings were totally worthless – like most British cities?  She might reasonably argue that past builders were unconstrained by today’s self-defeating planning laws.  But towards the end of the book she reveals an important truth:

In the past ten years, while most of the new residences continued to be built as faithful historical copies, the principles of Henry Cameron had won the field of commercial structure: the factories, the office buildings, the skyscrapers.  It was a pale, distorted victory; a reluctant compromise that consisted of omitting columns and pediments, allowing a few stretches of wall to remain naked, apologizing for a shape – good through accident – by finishing it off with an edge of simplified Grecian volutes.  Many stole Cameron’s forms; few understood his thinking.  The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.

In the countries of Europe, most prominently in Germany, a new school of building had been growing for a long time: it consisted of putting up four walls and a flat top over them, with a few openings.  This was called new architecture.  The freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became a mere elimination of all effort, even the effort of mastering historical styles.  It became a rigid set of new rules – the discipline of conscious incompetence, creative poverty made into a system, mediocrity boastfully confessed.

“A building creates its own beauty, and its ornament is derived from the rules of its theme and its structure,” Cameron had said.  “A building needs no beauty, no ornament and no theme,” said the new architects.  It was safe to say it.  Cameron and a few men had broken the path and paved it with their lives.  Other men, of whom there were greater numbers, the men who had been safe in copying the Parthenon, saw the danger and found a way to security: to walk Cameron’s path and make it lead them to a new Parthenon, an easier Parthenon in the shape of a packing crate of glass and concrete.  The palm tree had broken through; the fungus came to feed on it, to deform it, to hide, to pull it back into the common jungle.”

That passage should be printed out and nailed to the door of RIBA’s offices.

The political and economic debate between individualism and collectivism will go on for as long as man is capable of reason; but I’d like to see it applied to the realm of aesthetics.  Has any collaboration or collective ever produced worthwhile art?  Perhaps not, though every Michaelangelo needs a Church to commission his Sistine Chapel, just as Roark needed Gail Wynand, his rags-to-riches, will-to-power newspaper magnate.  Though, as Will Self has written:

There are two ways of looking at the traditional demarcations between commissioner and commissioned.  One is that they allow architects, engineers, developers and financiers to divide large projects into suitable chunks of endeavour; the other is that they allow for responsibility for a botched job, or a structure disparaged by the public, to be similarly doled out – or even altogether avoided.

To stand on Ellis Island and gaze across to Manhattan (ideally with Rhapsody in Blue thundering from your iPod) is to marvel at the achievements of the American century.  Imagine Rand were somehow transported to contemporary Shanghai, and that she stood on the Bund looking across to the Pudong, transformed in a decade from paddy fields to a forest of skyscrapers and commerce.  She might imagine it had been done by the hand of Rourk-esque auteurs; but it’s all collective, all the work of committees and corporations, the unforeseen meld of capitalism and communism.  Collectivism endures; man is pragmatic more than he is heroic.  Every functioning city is a collective.  No man is an island, and – despite how it appears from Ellis Island – neither is Manhattan.

I felt in a kind of prophetic mood, the mood in which you foresee
the end of the world and get a certain kick out of it.

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The architecture of misery

I took a stroll on a cold, bright day last week from Argyle St towards Great Western Rd through Kelvingrove Park.  I stared briefly at the peeling statues of bygone philosopher kings, and wistfully admired the clocks, fountains, lampposts and bandstand, once ornate but ravaged by rust and time.  I paused to doff my hat to the ducks, their comical arses bobbing from the river, and paid my respects to a tame, inquisitive squirrel digging beneath a sturdy oak.  He sensibly darted off at the arrival of a vicious black mongrel, who did his best to chase him into the stream with fangs bared.  I smiled at how quickly my little idyll had been shattered by the reality of nature, red in tooth and claw.

My reverie was broken, and my realisation took on a new relevance, as I emerged from the park at the bottom of Gibson St, where a new set of student flats, under construction for a while, now seem to be nearing completion.

Look how poorly these fit their impressive, if dilapidated, immediate environment.  Look at the garish, unsuitable colours, the incongruous styles and materials, the cheap, unadorned PVC windows, the unpleasing angles and excessive height.  There is simply nothing interesting to look at.  The joy of Victorian Gothic architecture is in its intricacy: to appreciate those buildings fully, it is necessary to look at them repeatedly and at length.  With these flats, it is only necessary to glance at them fleetingly, perhaps while jogging or driving past, to get the measure of the craftsmanship they embody.  I suppose the best thing we can say about them is that they offer a fine view, which is not something nearby residents (or customers of Tchai Ovna) will be able to say any more.

We can imagine the sort of student who will soon move in: probably studying fashion marketing or sports science or something equally modish, staring at his low, blank ceiling while listening to Snow Patrol on his iPod or guffawing at American teen comedies; in short, a sucker who thinks himself leftwing because he has bought a poster of Che Guevara or Bob Marley for his bare wall.

I have long given up wondering how such buildings are given planning permission in the West End of Glasgow, once one of the world’s finest Victorian neighbourhoods.  The answer is a time-honoured Glaswegian combination of old-fashioned corruption – made possible by being a one-party state for decades – and nervous neophilia.

Our city fathers have chosen to ignore the lessons of the 1960s, when slum neighbourhoods were uprooted and moved to new suburbs and towns that were in the most voguish style but rapidly crumbled, and when tenements and mansions alike were blasted to build motorways, bridges and office blocks.  This was not just the fault of the Labour Party: Tory governments also embraced the planning revolution that touched every corner of Britain.  Although we might now marvel at these concrete atrocities, they must have made more sense at the time.  Britain had become a poor country, chronically short of houses after the war, and there was an understandable desire to cast off the crumbling squalor and class-ridden cruelty of past decades and embrace the white heat of tomorrow.  Centrally planned, open, clean, bright buildings offered a way to achieve this.  The experiment failed, but we can forgive the planners their intentions.

There is no such excuse now.  Britain has once again become a wealthy country (or was until a couple of months ago) but one led by philistines with no sense of civic pride.  Delhi will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, and Glasgow the following Games.  The two cities have a lot in common.  Each looks at comparable regional cities and tries to copy their most superficial achievements.  Trendy Zaragoza has a postmodern Zaha Hadid structure; childish Glasgow too shall have one.  Prosperous Bangkok has a light rail system; impoverished Delhi must have an underground.  Both cities let basic amenities crumble – swimming pools in Glasgow, running water and rubbish collection in Delhi – in favour of hubristic projects like the Games.  Both wreck their most historic and beautiful quarters.  Compare the buildings Glasgow now allows to burn and to be bulldozed with those it allows to be built and you begin to grasp the scale of the vandalism.

The problem with postmodern architecture is that it reduces the diversity and heritage of each city that embraces it.  It becomes impossible to tell whether one is in London, Moscow, Shanghai, Dubai, etc.  Each building is deliberately divorced from its surrounding environment.  I would like to visit a city consisting entirely of buildings made of curved steel and floor-to-ceiling glass.  But to have one such building in every neighbourhood in the world turns all the world’s neighbourhoods into copies of each other: an elite McCity project, an extension of the depressing cultural homogenisation going on in every other aspect of globalised life.  It takes the awe and wonder out of visiting farflung cities, and removes the romance, the whole point of travel.  It calls itself progressive, but look at the governments it gets into bed with.

There is a backlash against this trend, a movement which aspires to reinject a human scale and a sense of place and community into the built environment, often by using local materials and labour to traditional styles and techniques.  Its deconstructivist detractors call it reactionary: I say they, the Rogers and Fosters, are the establishment and the mainstream, so they are the reactionaries and the new urbanists the revolutionaries.  (Sadly, the charge seems plausible because Britain’s leading exponent of new urbanism is the somewhat untrendy Prince Charles.)  The backlash has reached Inverness but sadly not Glasgow.  The Hadid, Rogers and Foster icons might not seem to have much connection with student flats on Gibson St, but I think the arrogant movement they head provides a figleaf for the “luxury living” rubbish we see everywhere.

The flipside of these “luxury” flats in cities and by “regenerated” waterfronts – and everything above a corrugated hovel on the wrong side of the tracks in Lagos is now billed as luxury – is the sprawling identikit “new homes” estates which are built everywhere in Britain to a hypnotically bland and homogeneous model.  It is not possible to live in such a soulless environment and still acquire or retain a personality: I suppose that is the point of them.

Alex Salmond mentioned in a recent interview that he grew up in a council house, which he described as “a good house, fundamentally sound, and a lot better than the stuff Barratt throws up.”  So his heart is in the right place.  If he would actually prevent Barratt throwing this stuff up though – perhaps by enforcing the CABE’s guidelines, or giving some teeth to the equivalent body in Scotland – he would have my vote.  Perhaps the recession will stop a lot of these monstrosities being built; if so, bring it on.  On the other hand, it may further reduce the quality of what is built.  Either way, urban design and planning are grossly neglected issues.

It isn’t hard to build decent, liveable buildings that fit in with their environment, as these new flats show on Gardner St -

and on Great George St -

I may make this theme of examining good and bad new buildings a regular one.  Fellow flaneurs are welcome to join in with beauties and horrors from your own strolls.

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