Why is there paranoia about fire on construction sites in the UK, whereas it is not a problem in California?  I have a feeling it is because large construction sites in urban areas in California have security on the job site 24 hours a day. It is very common for large buildings to be constructed on tight urban sites up to five stories tall entirely out of timber. While arson may be more common in the UK, it seems that with proper alarm systems and supervision it is entirely possible to prevent these sort of incidents from happening. The benefits of timber construction seem too great to rule out the method due to poor implementation so far.The biggest part of the problem seems to be that timber is unfamiliar to many contractors, and proper precautions are not taken because the disconnect between timber frame contractors and the general contractor (on many jobs in the US, the lead contractor is responsible for the timber frame).

7 acres of Timber Frame construction at Tassafaronga Village, Oakland CA

Hopefully, many of these problems can be worked out. Interest in this type of construction in the UK is high in light of the desire to reduce CO2 in construction- it seemed that innovative methods of timber construction were everywhere at last week’s Ecobuild conference here in London.

Timber frame under construction in Oakland

The first stop on our weekend getaway was the last stop on the National Express coach, Southsea. After a brief stop at Portsmouth (which is only about a 10 minute drive away, at most) where all of the other passengers except for my wife and me disembarked, the coach pulled up in front of a vaguely futuristic but well-worn strip of buildings with a small amusement park behind them. While the overall aesthetic is mid-century futuristic, I was most impressed by the “Jurassic 3001″ sign that looked to be in an advanced state of decay and was adorned with a CCTV camera:

Because the pier at Southsea isn’t very big, its certainly not an attraction in itself (for more thorough coverage of English seaside decay, take a look at this post on Fantastic Journal or this one at Mondo a-go-go). The real attraction in Southsea is the hovercraft! I was thrilled when I discovered it was possible to take a hovercraft to the Isle of Wight, and it is quite a bit cheaper than the other ferry. Unfortunately, the interior of the hovercraft left a lot to be desired and made the National Express coach seem fairly luxurious in comparison. It also reeked of diesel.

Still, floating on a cushion of air across the sea at high speed is pretty cool.

The hovercraft lands in the town of Ryde. It is the largest town on the Isle of Wight, with a population of around 30,000. The hovercraft, being the technological marvel that it is, sets you down on dry land and bypasses the adjacent pier (in the background above). It’s the 4th longest pier in the UK and also one of the oldest, which has earned it listed status. It’s from this pier that you can take the “train” (yes, it’s actually part of the National Rail network) 8 1/2 miles around the eastern part of the island:

You may recognize the carriages, they are retired 1938 London Undground stock. They run two at a time on a single track to 8 stops.

Disembarking in Sandown, many shops seemed to be closed. There are lots of tourist gift places, shoe stores, and restaurants that I wouldn’t want to eat at. There was also this person trying to sell their dogs via a sign on the door of a shop:

After an unfortunate experience with the B&B we booked, we ended up at the decidedly non-luxurious but clean Sandringham Hotel. It faces the beach and the staff members have to wear nautical uniforms while serving breakfast, so it was nearly perfect (despite the avocado green bathtub with a spot of duct tape and the lack of a shower). There was a cover band playing to a very small crowd at the bar, the whole scene pulled from a yet-to-be-made Christopher Guest film.

The best thing to do on the Isle of Wight, now that the Wax Works/ Brading Experience has closed, is to either visit English Heritage sites, go hiking or watch documentaries in your hotel room about thatched cottages. We did all of these things. Osborne House, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s gorgeous island home, was spectacular:

I was particularly impressed with the wrapped statues, as I have started to collect photos of them. If you are interested in going to Osborne House in the winter, make reservations ahead of time. You must be a guided tour and they are limited to groups of 20. The upstairs was closed for repairs. There are more of my photos of the house here on Flickr.

Then it was on to Carisbrooke Castle in Carisbrooke, near Newport. It was restored in the Victorian era and is also an English Heritage site. Located at the top of a hill, the castle offers spectacular views of the surrounding towns and countryside.

One of the things it is best known for is the well that is powered by a donkey walking on a wheel. There are a few demonstrations each day. Here is the obligatory photo:

From there it was off to the west of the Isle for a hike across Tennyson Down, where the poet used to walk on a daily basis. There is a large monument to Lord Tennyson at the highest point on the walk, which is particularly impressive late in the day. This photo could be straight out of a Christian inspirational calendar:

We continued walking to the end of the Island and saw the famous Needles:

On the way out of the park after seeing the Needles, I couldn’t resist this amazing front yard display. Note the many messages to visitors:

The following day was less cooperative, as far as the weather was concerned. After a brief stop at the Brading Roman Villa it was back to the mainland. Portsmouth, which has accurately but not very creatively chosen to call itself “The Waterfront City” (as if it were the only one) has attempted to re-brand itself with a massive seafront regeneration project known as Gunwharf Quays:

That tower in the background is a tower that you can’t miss, mostly because it is so ugly. One of many oval-shaped residential towers with blue glass to sprout up around the world in recent years, it is known as “No. 1 Gunwharf Quays” and was designed by architects Scott Brownrigg to resemble a funnel (I can only imagine the crit you would get in architecture school with an idea that brilliant). The other tall thing in the regeneration area is the Spinnaker, a ridiculous folly that attempts to compete with Dubai (at half-scale) and has had a broken lift since its opening nearly five years ago:

As if going the Cadbury (Kraft?) and Marks and Spencer Outlet shops wasn’t exciting enough, you can sip your Costa cappuccino while admiring this jauntily-painted World War II torpedo:

While Gunwharf Quays has been branded as a total success, it is hard to see what it is doing for the rest of the city. It’s not well connected to the city center for the pedestrian, and the massive underground car-park promotes the overall suburban feel. Most of the shops are interchangeable with what you would find at any other similar mall elsewhere in the world. I am sure it’s been a financial success for the developer, though I’m not sure 2009 was the best time to open a high-end residential tower in a struggling city. While the overall development has opened up the waterfront to the public (it was formerly a naval base) you never escape the feeling that you are in a shopping mall.

I couldn’t possibly say it better than this CABE case study: It is a collection of experiences that brings together various types of housing in a carefully considered, safe environment…

As soon as you leave the front gate it’s back to reality:

Basically, if you weren’t part of the European aristocracy, why bother? Stating that Gorky was “aware of Picasso, presumably from illustrated magazines rather than direct experience” shows the height of Sewell’s ignorance, as European modern art was frequently shown in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York was founded in 1929, and private galleries were regularly showing cubist work during this era. I have a hard time believing a young painter living in the city at that time would not have sought out a single Picasso painting by the mid 1930s.  By 1937 a major show of twenty years worth of his paintings was on view at Jacques Seligman & Co., and in 1939 MoMA mounted a large retrospective of his work.

Sewell also goes to great lengths to criticise Gorky’s work as being derivative, going as far as calling his earlier canvases ”dim-witted imitations.” I think the same could probably be said of the early work of many painters, and for a man his early twenties at the time I don’t think it’s unreasonable for his work to show the influence of the great painters of the day.

The review condescendingly goes on to say of his experience being promoted to mentor at the Grand Central School of Art “I suspect the school was less grand than its name suggests.” The school was an artists’ cooporative, and was run out of New York’s Grand Central Station for twenty years starting in 1924. Founded by John Singer Sargent (one of the finest portraitists of the early 20th century) and Daniel Chester French (sulptor of the Lincoln Memorial and designer of the Nobel Prize medal), students included as diverse a crowd as Norman Rockwell, Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning.

Gorky is given credit for his drawings in the review, but it certainly gets under Mr. Sewell’s skin that he is regarded as a painter in any way. In fact, he blantently says Gorky did not know what he was doing and credits his fame to the “jabberwocky-driven critic Clement Greenberg.” Sewell’s antagonism towards Greenberg leads him to dismiss the importance of the influence Gorky had on the art world of the 1940s and 1950s (including de Kooning and Jackson Pollack), which alone in itself makes Gorky’s work worthy of a major retrospective.

In his 1964 essay “The Myth of Originality in Contemporary Art”  in the Art Journal, David Hare writes:  ”To my mind, Gorky became at the end of his life, far more original than the Abstract-Expressionists that followed him” and then goes on to say “Gorky’s was not as original as the work of Jackson Pollack, but much more interestingly so, since Gorky became original in the face of art history, which he loved.” This is key to understanding the importance of his work: he successfully negotiated his way out from under the weight of the baggage of pre-war art and created something that was almost unbelievably new. It is unfortunate that it took him a long time to do this, and that he departed from the world at the age of 44.

Arshile Gorky’s late work is amazing in the way it dissolves surrealist imagery into beautifully composed non-figurative gesture. I was transfixed by one of his finest works, “The Liver is the Cock’s Comb,” which I used to stare at on every visit to the Albright-Knox Art Museum in Buffalo where I grew up. I have no doubt you won’t regret that you “paid a tenner” (to use Mr. Sewell’s phrase) to see the show, I am very much looking forward to it myself.

The Liver is the Cock's Comb, by Arshile Gorky (1944); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY

Donnybrook Quarter, drawing by Peter Barber Architects

Robin Hood Gardens drawing by Kenny Baker, courtesy NY Times

While Donnybrook Quarter is often called “high density” (one example is in this award statement from the AIA) it’s interesting to note that Robin Hood Gardens is facing demolition for not being dense enough (compared to the proposed redevelopment), yet both projects have a very similar unit count per acre: 45 units per acre at Donnybrook (published figure) and approximately 50 units per acre at RHG (calculated density). The first thing one notices upon entering the Donnybrook Quarter site is its density, it may be low-rise but it definitely feels tightly packed:

Donnybrook Quarter central street

Front windows are on the pavement, and aside from some sparse planting strips there is no transition at the building facades, in contrast to many traditional terrace house typologies in England (though Victorian terraces are often built right at the street edge) or townhouses in US cities like New York where there is usualy a stoop or small front garden. This lack of transition in front of the houses means that people have done little to personalise them as the public zone starts at your front door. The private space provided on the small balconies  play into Barber’s frequent quoting of Walter Benjamin and his ideas about using building as a stage, but I would be surprised if they are ever actually animated by human activity as they are extremely small and exposed. The shops at the main street edge are a welcome feature and they help to give more personality to scheme as a whole through their signage and window displays.

Density at Robin Hood Gardens is created by concentrating the housing units in two residential blocks, which flank a large central green space to shelter it from the surrounding traffic. The site is essentially a large traffic island, with the Blackwall Tunnel approach on one side and a multi-lane road with buses on the other (Google Map). Open space was required in the program given to the the Smithsons, and their solution was a very effective way to achieve it while still maintaining a high enough unit count to meet the design brief. The original program also called for maximum sound levels of 50 DBA during the day and and 35 DBA at night, which resulted in a street edge that looks like this:

Robin Hood Gardens, Cotton Street elevation

Another element called for in the brief was parking, which is located in a “moat” behind the concrete sound wall and beneath the building:

Parking at Robin Hood Gardens

A solution that put the parking entirely under the buildings would have been preferable, as the current layout makes it difficult to approach the building from the sidewalk. Visitors need to walk to one end or the other to cross the sunken parking area and then walk around the blocks to reach the open space at the centre of the site. The central garden is enormous, and welcome considering the amount of traffic the surrounding area. A massive flock of birds took to the air as I approached the constructed hill at its centre- I can’t stress what an impression this makes when you walk into the garden from the south. The hill and trees planted on it create a third edge for the courtyard and make it feel secluded from the surrounding city. The site would be improved by incorporating more programmed space in the courtyard like a picnic area, better play areas, and allotment gardens for residents, as it doesn’t seem to be very heavily used at present.

Robin Hood Gardens open space

Looking back to Donnybrook Quarter, I was expecting to be blown away by its pristine whiteness based, as most of the published photos of the project seem to emphasize this contrast with the surrounding brick construction. In reality, after a four years of exposure to East London air quality and visits by neighbourhood taggers, a bit of the shine has worn off.

Donnybrook Quarter street view

Most of the paint has peeled off the steel balcony rails, and some of the render has been painted over and/or damaged, resulting in a uneven surface finish. When I saw this project published a few years ago, I questioned how a white render exterior finish would survive at street level in London. The answer? Not well. The colour is attributed to a desire for light to reach deep into tight corners in Ellis Woodman’s review of the project in Building Design, but I think it’s a purely stylistic choice for Peter Barber, as it is a frequently recurring theme is his work and he speaks of the influence of Alvaro Siza in shaping his design sensibilities. While this colour scheme and material choice may work well on a Portuguese hillside, it is inappropriate for a high-traffic site in the middle of East London.

Many of the most frequent criticisms of Robin Hood Gardens involve issues of maintenance that are out of the realm of the architect’s responsibility, and the Tower Hamlets council has been accused of avoiding work on the building to encourage residents to move out. Upon visiting the site, the building itself doesn’t look  bad considering the obvious lack of care it has received over the years. While some people may not appreciate concrete, it is certainly more durable and retains most of its original appearance more than thirty years on. Many of the painted bits obviously need care, and the interior public spaces have always been problematic (see Nicolai Ossolouf’s piece in the NY Times for more on this) but overall the complex has not aged poorly, all things being considered. It is easy for people to point at trash or graffiti and claim that it was somehow the fault of the architecture, but this is usually symptomatic of social and economic issues not design choices. In fact, it even happens at celebrated and progressive new mixed-tenure developments:

Trash-filled stairway at Donnybrook Quarter

Both projects approach housing design from a very different standpoint, both theoretically and materially. With proper maintenance and upgrades, Robin Hood Gardens could be made viable for generations to come. The density could be increased without compromising the original design (or tearing it down completely) through careful architectural intervention. Donnybrook Quarter has some obvious shortcomings, but overall it is a welcome change from most of the other housing that has gone up in the area. Peter Barber has created a new typology that still needs some fine-tuning, but is otherwise a smart update to the traditional terrace house.  I think each of these projects could have stood to incorporate pieces of the other within their designs- a smaller garden with more intimate spaces would have helped at Robin Hood Gardens and more durable materials and some permeable landscaping would have been nice to see at Donnybrook.

Full photo set of both projects on Flickr

Interest in rebuilding the arch gained favour after Dan Cruickshank, an architectural historian, professor and BBC television presenter, discovered its remains in the River Lea in the East End. Cruickshank founded the Euston Arch Trust. This organisation’s goal is to rebuild the arch at Euston, most likely as part of the planned station redevelopment. There is a heavily produced video (with music) of the proposed redevelopment of the area by Sydney and London Properties here.

My initial reaction to the idea of rebuilding the arch was that it was an absurd waste of resources- let the past be the past, accept that it is gone and move on.  In the aforementioned Twitter discussion, Will Wiles went even further- he’s proposed a counter-campaign to re-demolish the arch, complete with T-shirts.

Rebuilding the arch  Post-Postmodernism to me: a piece of non-ironic yet nostalgic pastiche that takes liberties while framing itself in an air of authenticity. It is symptomatic of what Raoul Eshelman defines as performatism in his essay “Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism“. While Eshelman’s sole architectural example is Sir Norman Foster’s Reichstag in Berlin, I believe a reconstructed Euston Arch would fit the bill precisely because it is being promoted as “real” – and not merely a historicist recreation of the past. By dredging the river and incorporating actual stones, the rebuilt arch results in exactly the type of  ”perfomative, authorial framing” Eshelman refers to in his essay. I am not particularly a fan of Post-Postmodernism, so this certainly does not swing me over to the side of the rebuilders.

On the other hand, there is a precedent for recreating buildings that I have always found fascinating. The Ise Shrine in Japan is rebuilt every twenty years, in exactly the same manner and materials each time. The new shrine is built adjacent to the old one and then the old one is dismantled when the new one is complete. The present shrine is the 61st iteration, and a new one is due in 2013. By rebuilding, the shrine is always new yet is ancient at the same time.

Main shrine building - Naiku, from Wikipedia

Perhaps the Euston Arch is operating on a slightly different cycle, and instead of the overlap experienced at Ise, there is a lag where the Arch disappears only to make a triumphant return after a lengthy absence?  The Euston Arch could always be new upon its appearance, and watching it be demolished would be part of its rebirth.

On a final note, I am somewhat sympathetic to rebuilding because I admittedly enjoy a number of buildings that have been built out of their proper historic context. This Frank Lloyd Wright-designed boathouse in Buffalo, New York was built long after FLW passed away. Designed for a site in Wisconsin in 1905, it was built in Buffalo in 2007 (and it’s not the only Wright reconstruction in the area) and my wedding reception was held here last summer. Architects don’t build their buildings, architects produce drawings for someone else to use to construct a building. This mediated relationship to the final product means that you don’t really need to see the artist’s hand in the work- rebuilding a building, if done properly, is not much different than building the original and is far different from recreating a painting or sculpture which is dependant on the presence of the artist. Perhaps if Preston’s gorgeous brutalist bus station is demolished, we could rebuild it at Euston as well?

The FL Wright-designed boathouse in Buffalo

Leadville by Edward Platt - This book was suggested to be back when I was living in San Francisco when I told someone in London where I was going to be living. Little did I know how fitting this would be.

Leadville is subtitled “A biography of the A40″ and tells the story of Western Avenue in London. Edward Platt, the author, looks into the lives of the people living beside this extremely busy commuter road. As he begins to interview the residents, he quickly realizes that he has stumbled into the tail end of a decades-long project to move the residents out of their houses to accomodate the widening of the road. While to an outsider it may look like a vision of hell, living practically on top of a motorway, as he talked with many of the long-time residents he realized that many of them were not in a hurry to leave. He also encounters squatters and a variety of other more transient residents, including temporarily-housed council tenants who don’t know where they will go when they are finally forced to leave. Platt also delves into the history of development in West London and looks at how it differed from the development of similar communities in the United States. All in all, an excellent book to read if you want to learn about the development of suburban London in the 20th Century and the politics of roads. My own existence in London is centered very close to a number of roads that closely resemble the A40, as does the residential architecture of my neighbourhood.

The North Circular Road in London at dusk

Concrete Island by JG Ballard – I had never read Ballard before picking up this book at the local library. I realized that if I was going to be an architect and live in the UK, I needed to read Ballard as he has been a huge influence in understanding the urban built environment. Ballard has never been as popular in the US as he is in his native country, though I’m still surprised at myself that I hadn’t picked it up.

Concrete Island tells the story of a wealthy 35 year-old architect (okay, you can already tell it’s a work of fiction) who goes off the road on his commute home from Central London and finds himself trapped on a traffic island.

Influenced by the recent development of urban motorways (the book dates to the early 1970s) and Ballard’s childhood love of Robinson Crusoe, the book reads as plausible, despite the unlikeliness of it actually occuring, due to the visceral style in which it is written. This was the perfect follow-up to Leadville because it gets at many of the same points dealing with the alienation caused by the modern vehicular landscape created in the second half of the 20th Century. The psychological implications of being trapped in this landscape are explored in a fascinating and sometimes disturbling manner.

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton – I should start this off by saying that this is the type of book I never would have read, had they not happened to have it at the library down the street. It was actually one of the only books in the “Architecture” section that wasn’t about remodeling your kitchen. While I’ve seen this author’s name all over the place for the past few years, I hadn’t actually read anything of his save for a magazine article.

This book was a definite counterpoint to the other two. Platt and Ballard spend their entire books essentially describing the design of dystopia, while Alain de Botton seeks to find the secrets to what makes people happy in architecture.

The main problem with the book is its very premise – it’s not really a building’s job to make us happy. In fact, after studying architecture as an art student in undergraduate art history classes, attending graduate school to study architecture, and spending several years practicing architecture, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “happiness” used in the context of architecture, except for this book.

De Botton likes the English city of Bath, some modern houses (if they have a touch of the traditional), and staying at historic Japanese inns. He dislikes Corbusier’s urban planning, fake Tudor houses with plastic beams, and poorly-proportioned residential skyscrapers. He never posits much of a theory as to what the “architecture of happiness” actually is. He also fails to recognize that for a variety of reasons, not all of the world should be designed to be happy.

While de Botton wishes London could have been as beautiful as Paris, he never mentions the immense upheaval caused by Hausmann as he forced his boulevards through the city (nor the alternative motives behind their creation). As nice as modern-day Paris may be (and as happy as it may make the author) happiness had very little to do with the redesign of the city in the 19th Century.This is same fault that I found throughout the book – it doesn’t dig very deep and relies on a fairly simple understanding of architecture and architectural history.

The book fails on many levels, but it may be a good introduction to architecture for someone browsing the library for a book on remodeling his or her kitchen.

After a few days in the room, something about the “artwork” didn’t sit quite right. It was all too homogeneous- the paintings in the bathroom (yes, above the toilet in a bathroom with no fan) and the ones above the bed and the desk all looked a bit too similar. We initially imagined that they had bought artwork from a local artist of limited creativity. My curiosity finally got the best of me, and I took one of the paintings off the wall and saw this:

Made in China hotel art, Model E-002

Upon taking both the paintings in the bathroom off the wall, we discovered that they both held the same model number and were both “Made in China.” There was no artist’s signature, and they were clearly painted on a larger piece of canvas that was cut up and stretched over various wooden supports to create a number of smaller “artworks.”

The "Artwork"

I should not have been shocked. It’s not that I expect hotel rooms to have great art- they usually have some sort of sailboat or flower themed art above the beds that blends into the wallpaper. I think the shock in this particular example comes from the very fact that the hotel went to such great lengths to brand itself as hip, modern, and urban. By putting abstract oil paintings on thick stretcher bars in each room, it conveys the idea that it is some sort of “artist’s loft” that we had the good fortune to stay at for the week.

They got the image right, without actually having to spend time or money picking out the artwork. Similar to the “FCUK bodywash, Boconcept sofas, and Nespresso Citiz coffee machines” that Will Wiles mentions in his recent post titled Urbanism Sells, this mass-produced art tells guests that they are not staying at the Holiday Inn- they are having a hip and edgy time in a renovated loft.

When I returned home and started to look for this type of mass-produced art online, I quickly realized it was everywhere. You can easily by a large oil painting to hang over your sofa for $40 from places like Stock Oil Paintings, which is actually Shenzhen Fine Art Co., LTD. On the “about us” page they make no pretense of being a broker for Chinese artists, rather they describe themselves as “a professional manufacturer of oil paintings, sculptures, frames and other art crafts.” You can choose by style, color, or artist. Artist, of course, not meaning the person that actually painted it, but rather a knock-off of a famous artist. Want a copy (in oil) of a Modigliani for over your bathtub but you only have $52? You’re in luck.

As I scrolled through the various pieces of bargain-basement Chinese factory-made art, I came across an “Andy Warhol” for only $88! The irony of purchasing a copy of a copied painting made by one of Andy Warhol’s assistants in his original Factory that has been produced in an actual factory in China would not be lost on Warhol himself, I’m sure.

Factory Made Warhol

I really wanted to believe that there would always be a market for local artwork at places like boutique hotels- it seems we are told time and time again that the creative people are the ones who’s jobs can’t be outsourced-this is the type of theory advanced by Richard Florida in his book “The Rise of the Creative Class” (who’s also recently come under fire from the left in Toronto for being an elitist) and by many others who want to imagine we can ship all the unpleasant jobs off to China and keep the creative ones for ourselves.

The sad truth is that artwork, to most people, is something you hang on the wall that doesn’t clash with the furniture. The hotel’s interior designer saw no reason to buy oil paintings from working artists when a factory in China can crank them out for $40 or less each and they basically become disposable pieces of decor. You don’t have to actually be hip, or edgy, or an artist- not when you can buy into the image online for half the price of a week’s groceries.

194x by Andrew M. Shanken (2009, U. of Minnesota Press)

Andrew is a assistant professor of Architectural History at the University of California, Berkeley. I was familiar with the topic of this book prior to reading it because I studied with him while I was a graduate student there a few years ago.

Andrew Shanken looks at the “culture of anticipation” that arose during World War II in the United States as architects planned for the year “194x”, the year the war would end and the austerity caused first by the Great Depression and then by the war would finally end. He tracks the steady rise of interest in planning, as architects envision themselves as controlling a complete redesign of society in the postwar era.

Shanken spends a lot of time in the book looking at how many of the well-known  architects of 1940s worked with prominent companies to promote their ideas and in turn tie them to consumer culture. While the industry magazines of the day did deal with the issue of “planning’, some of the most prominent publications of the day were actually produced in pamphlet format by private companies like Zurn Plumbing or Revere Copper and Brass. In pamphlets that have seemingly little to do with their products, architects advocated for every citizen to take part in civic planning (though there are several funny examples of the “planning” concepts being used to sell mundane products like toilets or flooring).

As the end of the war drew close, it became clear to many large companies that an expanded version of the status quo would suit their needs better than a wholesale change of both the means of housing production and the role of the government in society. As Congress turned away from planning and Keynesian economics fell out of favor with a turn towards classical capitalism, modern architecture was singled out. As Shanken points out in the afterward, the battle between collectivism and laissez-faire capitalism has been a steady feature in American society with each generation seeing it play out differently. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, an individualistic worldview and lassez-faire economics combined with massive Defense Deparment infrastructure investments in road-building would lead to the auto dependent suburbs that quickly surrounded every American city. Large-scale regional planning of the type imagined during the War was generally not implemented.

The planning that did occur was often the most destructive sort. Slum clearance, a popular topic in planing literature of the 1940s, did happen to large areas of many cities during the 1950s and 1960s. Horribly disruptive and deliberately targeting the poor and minority groups, cities often bulldozed acres of housing with no clear plan as to what would replace it. I would love to have another chapter in this book that traces the lineage of the planning movements of the World War II era into the 1950s to see how the Utopian visions of that era ended up being very selectively deployed.

I think that Shanken is most successful in setting the tone for the era of the 1940s. Most architects hadn’t seen a significant amount of work in 15 years as the war drew to a close. There was going to be a housing crisis when soldiers returned from abroad contributing to a predicted postwar employment crises. This book does an excellent job of explaining how this scenario provided the perfect opportunity for architects to combine European modernism with American capitalism and then in turn sell it to the general public with Utopian visions of a drastically changed world. If you are interested understanding mid 20th Century American politics and consumer culture, this book is a must-read.

Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley (2009, O Books)

Owen Hatherley, writer of the blog Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy,  has written a short book that asks on the first page “can we, should we, try to excavate utopia?” While this book most certainly deals with architecture, it also delves into modernity in film, sexual politics and theater. The book is divided into four sections, each of which can be read independently.

The common thread through the four sections is desire to return to a modernism of everyday life, rather than the timid “Ikea modernism” we are left with today (Hatherley states that “Modernism has resurged, but in much the same way a Labour government is no longer a Labour government).

The first section on architecture is the strongest, but I may just be predisposed to feel that way because of my personal affinity for brutalism. The chapter looks at the development of brutalism as it was deployed in British housing estates during the 1960s, particularly by the Smithsons. He makes the point that the Smithsons were making a critique of ‘classical’ modernism, something that I feel is often forgotten – particularly when brutalism is discussed in the United States. “It is an attack on the purism and anti-urbanism of their predecessors,” replacing the picturesque and the spaced towers of miesian modernism with a dense network of internal streets. Most of all, it would “house the poor, be part of the new welfare state, it would be glamorous.”

Moving in to the second section, on Soviet Modernism of the 1920s, is a look at a chapter of architectural history that has been to a large degree ignored. I found the most interesting part of this chapter to be the proposals for disurbanism put forward by sociologist Moisei Ginzburg in 1930. Opposing the idea of collective planned spaces under socialism, he advocated a form of development where vast networks of people live in transportable pods and connected by transportation networks. Hatherley points out the fact that this is the extreme of both collectivism and individualism, and that it is a prophecy of what Los Angeles was to become in the second half of the 20th Century (but far more extreme than what Los Angeles actually became). The paper architecture (and some actual realized architecture) of this era is something I probably need to become more familiar with to fully appreciate this section.

The following two sections, reading modern film and it’s relation to sexual politics and theatre, weren’t as strong as the architectural chapters. They do help support the argument for modernism as a total break from the past- a new way of thinking and living that offered “possible outlines of a world after capitalism.” Perhaps we don’t literally need the exact type of socialist utopias envisioned in the first half of the last century, but it is quite sad that we don’t bother dreaming of a world that could be different from our own- even as we watch the foundations of our system collapse around us.

This is a very thought-provoking book, and a bit hard to find in the US at present.

View down Cadiz Street in Downtown Dallas

We won! You can read all of the details here: http://www.urbanrevision.com/ReVision-DALLAS-Results

We’ll have more info posted soon,along with the rest of our images. Congrats to the other two winners and everyone else that entered.

As foreign as vinyl siding seems here in San Francisco (almost everything is wood or stucco), vinyl is the leading exterior finish material for homes in the United States (according to The Vinyl Siding Institute). While I didn’t have a great opinion of vinyl to begin with, watching Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand’s 2002 documentary “Blue Vinyl.”

While the movie dragged at times, its indictment of the vinyl industry is hard to argue with. Creating a product that can’t be safely disposed of is a huge problem. While other siding materials, like fiber cement board, may not be easily recyclable either, vinyl siding is often burned either deliberately or by accident in landfill fires, releasing dioxin into the atmosphere. How bad is dioxin? The Environmental Protection Agency points out that there is “no safe level” for dioxin exposure (read more at http://www.ejnet.org/dioxin/). Well, at least you don’t have to paint vinyl siding…

The Vinyl Siding Institute  has tried to claim that vinyl siding can be a green material, even going as far as instructing people how to get LEED points by using it on new buildings. While the movie portrays it as a difficult choice finding an alternate material to re-clad the filmmaker’s parents’ house, for new construction there are a variety of competitive materials including fiber cement siding and stucco that may cost slightly more up front but don’t carry the tremendous externalities of using a product as toxic as vinyl.