High Tech Nostalgia

(Image courtesy Archigram)

I didn't mention this in my post on the white cliffs last week, but it fits in with many of the themes I was trying to write about. The image is from Archigram's Suburban Sets project, drawn by Ron Herron. The 1960's architectural avant garde of which Archigram were such an important part combined a number of interesting themes including a sort of high-tech pastoralism where architecture is reduced to an infrastructural support system for the countryside (Peter Cook's instant city), a love of gadgets and gizmos (Warren Chalk's gasket housing) and an interest in Do It Yourself (Ron Herron's Tuned Suburb).

Suburban Sets combines a number of these themes, reducing the 'architecture' to a vestigial, scenographic role, while adding a seam of nostalgic whimsy to the mix. The design posits a scenario where the house itself has been removed and the space given over to garden, while the occupant lives in an abandoned aeroplane parked in the weeds.

I was struck by the similarity of this scheme to the Team 4 hideway illustrated in the previous post. Both combine a fantasy of architecture's dematerialisation with a nostalgia for war-time technology: a fusing of the avant garde's preoccupation with anti-architecture and the childhood joys of Airfix kits.

Trumpet Blowing

I can be found doing my bit for the Socialist Lavatory League in the RIBA Journal this month where I extol the merits of the institute's bogs. Coming across a little like a situationist cottager (and, come to think of it, isn't cottaging an example of detournement?) I recommend opening them up to the public. I'm only disappointed that I couldn't find room for a reference to The Fonz who, if memory serves, used the toilets of the local diner as his "office" in the sit-com Happy Days.

Also, myself and fellow FAT blogger Sam Jacob are interviewed extensively on our reading habits in this month's issue of Mark mag. The interview was conducted by Steve Parnell - aka The Sesquipedalist - which makes the whole thing look thoroughly blogtastic. I'm not sure about the opening sentence, but other than that it's a good piece accompanied by an excellent photograph of my back.

I promise a bit of original content on this blog soon (and not only on old stuff about the war an' that innit) as it was never intended as a forum for blowing my own trumpet, (euphemism intended) even though it may read a bit like that at the moment. Just thought you might be interested that's all......

Digging In: Inhabited Landscapes of War

Last Sunday I went to Dover to do some not particularly thorough research in advance of FAT's design studio. I'm ordering most of the images I took into a photo-essay which I will post up here shortly. The following thoughts though focus exclusively on the cliffs and their history as a landscape of defence.

Dover's white cliffs are geology as ideology, a landscape supposedly embodying a myth of heroic English resistance. There is a way though that they more literally house a history of defence. They are inhabited with a network of tunnels that have acted at various points as cannon emplacements, hospital wards and war rooms. These tunnels occasionally pop out of the cliff face as ad-hoc bits of buildings with an incongruously domestic scale. Balconies, greenhouses and Pallladian arched windows hint at submerged buildings deep within the cliff.

Sometimes they are more substantial, like this one complete with HVAC ductwork sticking out - an air-conditioned cliff - which looks like a fragment of some Victorian railway viaduct. There's a touch of Planet of the Apes about it, as if a landslide has buried some former trainshed. Or, perhaps, that the cliffs are an elaborate piece of camouflage formed from plaster of paris and fake grass propped up by a rickety timber framework.


(Images and info via)

In fact the cliffs are riddled with carved out spaces created over centuries by war and capable of housing 4000 troops. Somewhere within them is the Regional Government centre, built during the cold war in the event of nuclear attack. Radar masts and pre-radar sound mirrors dot their surface, while tele-communications thread through the limestone below.



The cliffs also house the remarkable Grand Shaft, a 140 foot deep staircase directly connecting the former cliff top barracks to the town below. This entire section of the cliff is known as the Western Heights, an interconnected series of earthworks and defences begun in the middle ages, expanded massively during the 18th century and achieving its most fabled role in the 1940's.



The cliff as secret, inhabited fortress also reminds me of the remarkable photographs of camouflaged US aircraft factories in the second world war. Here an entire Lockheed factory was disguised as a landscape by a series of vast stage set paintings of fields, dotted with three dimensional mock ups of farms and trees. Underneath this elaborate cover the factory went about its business.


(This image and more via)

Here, perhaps, is also an unlikely seedbed for all those post-war architectural fantasies of serviced landscapes: Archigram's unbuilt Monte Carlo scheme - a casino and entertainment complex disguised as a hill, Reyner Banham's Un-House, Superstudio's inhabited buildingless environments.



(Archigram. Plan of Monte Carlo Entertainment Centre via)

It exists more overtly in the gadgetry of high-tech architecture. Foster and Roger's early Team 4 house in Creek Vean included a hidden room in the hillside overlooking the Cornish coast. Not only does this mysterious, insular, space appear like the glazed bubble over a Lancaster bomber cockpit, but it is a room literally buried into the ground, a fortress of privacy and seclusion.



UPDATE:

A bit of further reading has revealed some inaccuracies in this post, for which I apologise. Dover Castle and the Western Heights are two distinct places entirely, although you wouldn't realise that from reading the above. While the castle is perhaps the quintessential image of Dover, the Western Heights on the other side of the harbour are home to far more ambitious fortifications in the form of the Citadel and the Drop Redout, two enormous 18th century fortresses embedded within the landscape of the cliff.

In fact, the Western Heights form a sort of inversion of the cliffs on which the castle sits, an enormous but invisible counterpoint. It is a truly fortified landscape where the entire cliff top has been sculpted into a system of defence. It is a schedule ancient monument although large sections of it have been destroyed. The Citadel itself - a pentagonal fortress - is now a Young Offenders Institution.

You can view it here.

What I Did This Autumn

Apparent on-line inactivity should not be taken for slothfulness. I have been busy. Honestly. I can be found, for example, reviewing Paul Barker's book The Freedoms of Suburbia in the current issue of Architecture Today. This is a book that has been reviewed pretty extensively in both the architectural and mainstream press so my piece is hardly new but it manages to be - unexpectedly - more critical than some others.

Although I'm generally pretty positive about the joys of suburbia, I was concerned by both a knee-jerk anti-modernism in Barker's book (a bit rich coming from someone complaining about aesthetic prejudice) and a strain of free-market libertarianism which dismisses any form of social policy or politically informed housing policy. "Politically informed housing policy" is a phrase likely to send a chill into Paul Barker's heart I imagine. Nonetheless I don't regard suburbia as some kind of natural phenomena - the unperverted manifestation of people's desires - as many of its apologists do. It is however pretty good at reconciling a number of competing desires that people seem to have. Its loose, relatively unplanned form also allows elements of the unexpected to occur which is one reason why architects, with their fetish for form and control freakishness, don't like it.

Anyway, it's all there in the review which is short but pithy! It's not to be found online unfortunately (pointless link here) so you will either have to buy a copy or, alternatively, study for seven years to become a registered architect and get a free subscription. Either way, the issue is well worth buying for the extended essay on the reconstruction of Berlin by Doug Clelland.

Also this month I'm in Icon reviewing James Wines' recent lecture at the Barbican and wearing a pair of silly sunglasses. That's me not James Wines. He's the guy with the big beard. This is something of a split jury review too as Wines is a bit of a hero of mine, albeit one whose recent work lacks the punch of his early stuff.

Finally, on Thursday I'm giving a lecture at the University of Portsmouth School of Architecture. If you live there and you read this (what are the chances?) come along.

(Illustration: George Shaw: What I Did This Summer. Via)