The New London Model at the London Building Centre, officially launched last week, is quite something. Covering 85 square kilometres at 1:2000 scale, it incorporates 3-D-printed models of an amazing 170,000 buildings. That's every single office building, block of flats and evenindividual house from White City in the west to the Royal Docks in the east.
The experience of visiting it is, as you might imagine, akin to looking out the window of a plane when flying over the city on the approach to Heathrow, but with the added bonus of being able to stop and peer over for a closer look so that you really can actually see your house down there. Gratifyingly, I was, indeed, able to spot my home of 3 years' back in Bromley-by-Bow, an unassuming ex-council maisonette, or, at least, the block it was in:
Whilst the model itself is unquestionably a great achievement and definitely worth seeing, I'm rather more equivocal about the healthiness of the perspective that it puts the viewer in.
At this scale, the eye bounds over so many hectares of low and medium-rise neighbourhoods and is drawn, instead, inexorably, to the great high-rises clustered around the City of London and Canary Wharf, plus the unmissable Shard.
As precise as the models are, for any building smaller than skyscraper-sized, you are really just getting a place-marker for size and basic layout. The particularities of structural form, let alone architectural detail, fail to show up. It is not even possible to tell the difference between office and residential block without the clues provided in real life by surface texture; everything here is rendered in white or grey (depending on its state/date of construction), thus you can't even tell from the models what is glazed and what is masonry wall.
This means the small scale is more-or-less unintelligible, and hence boring. From such a vantage, the only structures that truly hold any interest are the really big ones - the Shards, Walkie Talks, Cheesegraters and so on - the only ones whose forms are actually legible. The result is that one is encouraged - and this is the rhetorical undercurrent here, not necessarily an intentional one (although it is noteworthy that the model was sponsored by a host of major developers such as Westfield, Barratt and Land Securities) - to wish that far more of the city could be populated with those more lively looking large creatures, at the expense of the tedious moss-like carpet that covers most of the surface area at present.
In other words, boo low-rise and hooray super-tall!
This insidious rhetorical slant is all the more apparent when you ask yourself, afterwards, the slightly counter-intuitive question: what was I *not* drawn to when I looked at it? When I now think about it whilst I spent much time skyscraper-spotting many of London's most attractive and lively locales failed to register completely: Soho, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Notting Hill, Borough Market, Camden... They were there, but I don't recall my attention being directed to them.
Not represented in a 1:2000 model: the spirit of Camden Market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Camden_Market#/media/ File:Camden_lock_market.JPG)
Nothing about what make these places - London's famous "villages" - so special is captured at this scale. All of the buildings that comprise these places are there, for sure, precisely replicated in the model, but their essence, feel and even purpose isn't present at all. Accordingly, they demand neither your attention nor your respect.
There is something almostOrwellian about this: the means by which an idea is represented has succeeded in virtually annihilating the idea from all contemplation.
Put it this way, if I were an evil urban planner, trying to promote some scheme to demolish Soho to make way for office blocks (something that was once on the cards), or to knock down Camden Market to make way for a bland shopping mall (which has partly happened), or tear through swathes of inner London for some nightmarish modern version of the London Motorway Box, this is where I'd want to hold the public inquiry. A place where one is reminded of the immediate visual excitement of a super-tall, but one in which the sights and sounds and smells of a busy London open-air market, or the understated elegance of a London terrace, are conveniently hidden away in plain sight.
Sure, it is nice to be reminded how London fits together in the sense of appreciating the "proximity of Stratford to the City and the West End", as the model's promoters, the New London Architecture forum, point out, thought-provoking to be confronted with the scale of human intervention on such a large area of land represented in three-dimensional exactitude, and cool to marvel at the dedication of the model makers.
But just remember that, like all models - be they economic, philosophical or, as here, physical - the New London Model has its own set of underlying assumptions about what is and isn't important, and it necessarily leaves a lot out. The London Building Centre is located on Store Street, WC1E 7BT, nearest tube Goodge Street. See their website for visiting information. It is free entry to the exhibition.
The design of the hoardings around this building site at the lower end of the High Street in Tunbridge Wells (a conversion of a couple of buildings into a new hotel, 'One Warrick Park') is a rare, praise-worthy instance of developers taking the trouble to do something attractive with the temporary construction works:
The traditional approach to construction hoardings was to stick up a curtain of grimly utilitarian boards, in black, white or, say, sludgy green.
More recently, the trend is for boards covered with massive advertisements for the development, typically expressing irritatingly vacuous sentiments such as "CONNECT WITH THE CITY" or "AN OASIS OF STYLE". There is a whole blog, "Development Aesthetics" by Crystal Bennes, entirely dedicated to exposing the idiocy of that kind of thing.
These hoardings are different. Not only are the boards painted imperial purple, but each panel has a (presumably entirely decorative) frame of silver-painted timber. The boxes around the scaffolding poles are particularly attractive; they are reminiscent of the sort of brightly coloured pillars often found in London Underground stations. Promotional material is confined to a modest smattering of (A2-sized?) frames hung on the boards.
The overall message is one of humility and respect on the part of the developers towards the existing community. There is an anxiety here to make a positive contribution to the feel of the neighbourhood – a concern which has already manifested itself before the building is anywhere near completion.
Contrast that with the braying tone of the promotional hoardings showcased on Bennes' Development Aesthetics blog mentioned above, which seem to all be saying "Hey people, look at our big, shiny development that we'll make a lot of money from. And go fuck yourself if you can't afford to live here!"
Honeycrock Castle - my visit to which was the subject of my earlier post - is featured in a Channel 4 documentary, broadcast this evening. The documentary follows the story of Robert Fiddler's castle together with three other similarly long-running planning battles. Although the basic angle of the programme is 'Haha, look at these lunatics and the stupid things they try to do to get around planning rules!', the narrator cannot help but express admiration for this building: "... This is one impressive achievement. Robert's remarkable ingenuity and use of reclaimed materials meant that he was now the owner of this magnificent 1,700 square foot castle for just £50,000."
Coincidentally also in the news today, Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State who was responsible for making the final ruling against the Mr Fiddler and his castle, has been sacked in the post-election cabinet reshuffle.
The pictures above are from an article in Building Design, which quotes the director of the Victorian Society protesting that the incremental effect of such plans is to "nibble away at unlisted buildings of merit".
Exactly. This is the very heart of London, and if attractive, historic buildings shaped by medieval-sized plots are not safe here, they are not safe anywhere. Plus the replacement building is unnecessary and rubbish.
I was a surprised when I spotted an entrythe other dayin the "Did you know..." section of Wikipedia's main page reporting that the Art Deco Greyhound bus depot in Ann Arbor, Michigan was in the process of being demolished to make way for a hotel.
I visited Ann Arbor in 2011 to see a friend (at the University of Michigan - the town's major draw), and the bus depot was pretty much the only memorable structure in the downtown area. Here is a snap I took at the time:
It is not a huge building: not a depot in the sense of housing a fleet of buses, just a waiting area and a ticket office (albeit at one time apparentlythe building housed a cafe and a baggage room as well).
My friend and I actually used the depot to catch a bus to Detroit. From memory, the waiting room interior was quite run down. The other passengers and the counter staff looked pretty miserable, as you would be if you lived in Michigan and had to rely on public transport to get around. In other words, catching a bus there was not a particularly edifying experience.
But the exterior is a flash of stylistic panache in an otherwise dull downtown area. With its smoothed corners, go-faster stripes and Deco-lettering, it's a classic example of that techno-futurist idiom that emerged in 1930's America before quickly being swamped by the purer (and more boring) modernism of the International Style (although the idiom later influenced, through Norman Foster's affection for an office block in Manchester, England, late 20th century Hi-Tech, my favourite amongst the modern styles).
Initially, I was, as I say, shocked that such a vital piece of architecture was being torn down. However, on further investigation, it seems that, in fact, the developer intends to preserve the entire facade and incorporate it into the hotel. To this end, they have actually spent money on restoring the blue steel and neon sign that is the centrepiece of that facade (see right) before construction of the hotel starts.
Whilst the overall design for the hotel is a bit disappointing, and one will lose the contributory effect, which can be appreciated from the photos here, of the open sky above the flat roof of the building, at least the important part of the exterior is being preserved and will remain part of the town's visible urban fabric.
And it's relevant to note that this fabric is definitely fraying around the edges. Ann Arbor, with its massive university, is not quite Detroit (which really is a frighteningly desolate place, complete with buildings in the process of being reclaimed by nature, post-apocalypse style). But like all of Michigan the town has definitely been hit hard by the recent recession and by long-term industrial decline. Hence when I visited I saw plenty of places like this around the edge of town:
The place badly needs regeneration, in other words. An absolutist approach to preservation would say that historicbuildings need to be preserved intact. One can, as, for instance, the Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites recognises, add to them, sure, but subtraction - knocking bits down - is, apparently, completely taboo. Sure enough, it seems that local groups sought to oppose the demolition of the rest of the depot apart from its facade. But in the desire to preserve a great building, one cannot ignore the need to preserve the economic life of the city that houses it, particularly when that life is looking rather fragile.
I wonder if this plan actually represents a fairly good compromise between these goals.
The story about the lady who painted her Kensington townhouse with red-and-white candy stripes to annoy her neighbours - and who has been ordered by the authorities to paint the stripes out - recently caught a lot of people's eyes, mine included.
Why, indeed, is a stripy house so eye-catching? And would anyone have taken any notice if she had just painted it all bright red instead? As far as the first question is concerned, there is a surprisingly neat neurological explanation for this. Our strong response to stripes, and particularly stripes with sharp, high-contrast edges, is, on several levels, quite literally hard-wired into our brains.
I found out about the science involved here a little while ago, researching for a book I'm writing which touches on the psychology of vision (and so of architecture), and this came to mind when I heard about this story. It is a really fascinating area. Edges "Eyes that do not see", Le Corbusier was fond of saying. He was right. You don't see everything that your eyes are pointed at.
The picture of the world that is focused on your retina by your eye contains an awful lot of information, which is constantly being updated. Your brain doesn't need, and actually doesn't have space to keep, the vast majority of this. So, in effect, it bins a lot of the picture. In fact, much of the information is quietly chucked away before the signal generated by the light-detecting cells in your retina has even left your eyeball. How so? Well, there are nerve-cells in your retina - so-called "ganglion cells" - who do this work by getting excited by some things, and not by others.
Each one of these cells is wired up to a group of photo-receptors in a particular patch of your retina. That patch is called the cell's "visual field": it is the area that it 'sees'. If the light across all of the visual field is all of the same intensity - all bright or all dark - the cell will shrug its shoulders and stay quiet. What really interests a ganglion cell - what makes it go a bit mental with electrical excitement - is when one bit of its receptive field is lighter/darker than another bit: in other words, if there is a contrast at play. There is an explanation of how ganglion cells achieve this edge-detection trick in this Wikipedia passage (and a better one in Basic Vision, a really well-written beginner's guide to the subject), but, in simple terms, all they are doing is dividing their receptive fields into two areas, namely a spot and a surrounding area in the shape of a doughnut, and responding in an opposite way to it being light in one of these two areas to how they do if it is light in the other.
The diagram above shows that some cells are wired up so they get excited when it is light in the central spot, but are inhibited when it is also light in the surrounding 'doughnut' ("on-centred" cells). Some behave in the opposite way ("off-centred" cells). In either case, the cell doesn't fire when there is the same level of light across the whole of its receptive field. This would be the case if the receptive field lined up with, say, an area in the middle of a blank piece of paper. But when the receptive field is aligned with a contrast between light and dark - for example, the edge of the piece of paper - there will be a difference between the centre and the surrounding doughnut, and the cell may get activated, depending on where the edge falls on its receptive field. The upshot is that much of the signal that gets fed to your brain by the nerve cells in your eyes is information about contrasts - typically, the edges of objects. In other words, at one level, your brain is 'seeing' something like the image at the right, below, and probably using a fair amount of inference to 'fill in' the rest of the picture:
Thus, in a sense, we can only respond to change in colour or lightness. Our brain just doesn't react to unchanging blocks of the same colour. As the great vision scientist David Hubel puts it, when we look at a solid-coloured object, "... our perception of the interior as black, white, gray, or green has nothing to do with cells whose fields are in the interior—hard as that may be to swallow". As Hubel suggests, this finding is, perhaps, a bit disconcerting, as that's not what the experience of vision is like: it feels like we are seeing the whole picture, not just the outlines of stuff. But that perception is almost certainly just a comforting illusion.
One consequence of this brain architecture is that line drawings are very legible. Cartoonists just draw the edges, which, for the visual brain, are the essential parts of the world. So cartoons are easy to make sense of and tend to grab your attention. Another aesthetic consequence is that if the eccentric Kensington home-owner had simply painted her house in one solid block of colour - even if that was a bright, garish red - there is a good chance she would have failed to attract much attention. Solid blocks of colour, the research on retinal ganglion cells establishes, cause less activity in the 'early' part of your visual system than areas with lots of contrast. It is almost literally true to say that high-contrast patterns can get on your nerves; at least, they certainly make for more excitement of the nerve cells in your eyes than blocks of colour. The studies on ganglion cells and receptive fields date from the 1950's. But the psychological fact just described - that a blank expanse has less impact than a patten - was, it seems, spotted as far back in 1757, by Edmund Burke.
Edmund Burke - mercurial C18th writer, usually associated with inventing political conservatism, but who also wrote a fun, slightly space-cadet-y book about the psychology of aesthetics in his yoof ("Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful") - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke#/media/File:EdmundBurke1771.jpg
Burke was seeking to identify what the essential ingredients of impressiveness (what he called the "sublime") were. Impressive, awe-inspiring things, Burke observed, were usually big (such as a mountain), often involve uniform repetition (as with the beating of a war drum), and often have the quality of apparent boundlessness (like, say, the heavens). But if that were the case, why should, Burke asked "... a long bare wall ...not be a more sublime object than a colonnade; since the succession is no way interrupted; since the eye meets no check; since nothing more uniform can be conceived?" Despite the wall's uniformity, a row of columns will, Burke suggested, tend to be more "grand" than a blank wall of the same size, for in the case of the wall "... the eye runs along its whole space, and arrives quickly at its termination; the eye meets nothing which may interrupt its progress; but then it meets nothing which may detain it a proper time to produce a very great and lasting effect". Burke's idea here, namely that the human visual perceptual apparatus skips over stretches of blankness and that contrast is required to create an "effect", is exactly what the modern science of vision tells us actually happens inside our heads.
At any rate, the first thing that your visual system picks up about the stripy house is that there are a number of very sharp contrasts between light and dark. This generates quite a "loud" signal (lots of firing of neurons) from the get-go. This is probably a good idea if you want to get people's attention and you are, like the owner in this case, for some reason limiting yourself to doing so by painting an abstract pattern on your house. (If she really wanted to give her neighbours a hard time, why she didn't paint on an enormous silhouette of a disgusting insect head or something like that, I don't know). Stripes However, contrast is only the start of the story. Retinal ganglion cells are, recall, not even in your brain, but inside your eyeballs. From there, the signal is ultimately sent all the way through your brain, to a region, at the back, called the "primary visual cortex", or area "V1". This, together with neighbouring regions (named "V2", "V3", "V4", etc) , is where the brain gets to work processing the picture, identifying features in it, and eventually (it is thought) interpreting what we see. "V1" is the initial processing unit, and serves as a gateway to the rest of the visual cortex.
It turns out that there is one particular feature that the cells in "V1" get excited by: straight lines.
The scientists who got the Nobel Prize for this discovery were David Hubel (quoted earlier) and Torsten Wiesel. As they explain, in the following video, they made the break-through more-or-less by accident. They were showing pictures to a cat and measuring the response of the cells its primary visual cortex, without an awful lot of luck. One day, they realised that the only thing that was causing a reaction was the edge of the slide as they were inserting it into the projector:
Now, the second clip, below, is really cool. It shows one of the scientists actually mapping out the position and orientation of the line that each neuron is tuned to, by playing about with the position and direction of the line and literally drawing on rows of crosses over the projected image. It is awesome to be able "hear" the brain cells responding, as represented by the beeps into which the equipment translates their electrical activity.
There are all sorts of interesting aspects to this research. For instance, different cells are tuned to different sizes and orientations of line. Hubel and Wiesel found that the cells in this area of the brain are arranged so that there are little stacks of cells covering all possible orientations within each area of the visual field.
They also found that whereas some cells in V1 only respond to lines in very specific positions and orientations, other cells are more flexible about where the line is placed so long it is in the right orientation. We apparently don't know for sure how these cells ("complex cells") work, but David Hubel guesses that they must receive their inputs from a bunch of other cells whose receptive fields have the same orientation but are spread out in space. So long as one of these cells gets excited, the complex cell also gets activated.
The possibility that some line-detecting cells can be wired to receive inputs from other line-detecting cells would logically suggest that you (or, rather, nature) could easily design cells that only get activated if multiple lines of the same orientation are seen. So whereas complex cells are switched on if this "OR" (in the Boolean-operator sense) another line-detecting cell with the same orientation-preference is activated, these cells would be activated (only) if this "AND" a group of other line-detecting cells with the same orientation-preference were activated. In other words, such cells would be activated by a stripy pattern. And cells like this were, indeed, discovered in the 1990s: so-called "grating" or "periodic-pattern" cells.
The consequence of all this is that stripes are a very elemental features. They get your visual system excited, because straight-lines (or 'bars', in the parlance of vision scientists) are the very first kind of features that your brain extracts from the image. There are lots of specific neurons dedicated to doing this job.
A group of parallel lines are even more exciting still to the primary visual cortex because there are other cells dedicated to responding to groups of lines of the same orientation.
And to recall what was said above, the sharp contrast between the red and white stripes adds to the effect, because our retinal ganglion cells (which generate the signal that feeds the brain) respond more to hard contrasts.
So from the perspective of the science of basic visual perception the lady out to get her neighbour's attention totally hit the nail on the head when she decided to paint big red and white stripes on her house. Stripes are striking.
Social psychology
Of course, just because something is striking does not mean that it is objectionable. I actually really like the stripy paint-job on the house in Kensington. The design is smart, crisp and legible. The parallel lines, obviously, add up to a pattern. As well as reflecting each other, they reflect the vertical lines of the edges of the building, and indeed those of adjacent homes. So whilst the house might be said to be no longer "in keeping" in a first-impression, stylistic sense with its surroundings it certainly makes pattern with them, something which, for my money, is rather more important.
The impression created by a striking pattern of this kind is appealing not just because it is geometrically intelligible, but also because it is suggestive, in an ultimately very comforting way, of the operation, at some stage in the design process, of a human mind - an impression which is tragically lacking in the case of the average Barratt Home with its desultory, random patches of shingling or whatever, and equally in the case of modern blocks of flats with meaningless curves designed into their roofs in a non-committal attempt to inject some 'interest'. Judging by the reaction of a number of commentators (see for instance this Guardian piece, or this article in Architectural Review), I am not the only one with a sympathetic view of the work. So why the hostile reaction from the neighbours and the local authority?
The reason is surely that painting one's house in red and white vertical stripes is not only striking, but it is very unusual too. It is not the done thing to paint a house this way.
"We are", Burke observed, "... so wonderfully formed, that, whilst we are creatures vehemently desirous of novelty, we are as strongly attached to habit and custom." As this quote suggests, there is a market in life for both novelty and for familiarity. Equally, we can react badly to both: the novel may make us "uneasy", but the over-familiar, Burke acknowledged, often prompts "... a sort of weariness and disgust".
So far, so ying-and-yang. But things aren't necessarily so equally balanced in the way the manifestation of these responses are distributed over time. We know that our initial reactions to change are usually very negative (status quo bias) . Not only do these change-hating responses naturally fade after time, but, conversely, the creeping horror associated with the mundane takes a while to set in. We might not even notice a building as crushingly banal as the one pictured below when we first move to an area, but walk past it every day for a few years, it can really start to sap, if not your spirits, certainly your reserves of civil pride:
The evil of banality
Not only are our emotional responses over time to the ordinary and to the extraordinary asymmetric, but there appears to be a huge asymmetry in the social acceptability of complaining about these two things.
Whereas an objection to something because it stands out or fails to accord to custom essentially requires no further explanation to be intelligible - it is a recognised, virtually pro forma ground of complaint - an objection to a proposed design based on its blandness can be somewhat harder to articulate. And whereas the objection that "this doesn't fit in" appears to be automatically socially-sanctioned - an impression reinforced by swift response of Kensington & Chelsea Borough Council to the residents' complaints in the case of the stripy house - for some reason people seem to be less sure of their standing to object to something on grounds that it is just too dull. Perhaps this is because status-quo bias of the individual is somehow reflected in the social psychology of complaining. Perhaps it is because people are shy about being assertive before their peers over what are personal, aesthetic preferences: whereas objection to loud stripes can be dressed up as some sort of impersonal concern for the "character" of an area, it is perhaps harder to pretend this is the case when one is criticising a building's banality.
At any rate, this creates a very unfortunate dynamic. It explains why Britain's mass-development suburbs have such a soul-destroying appearance. The public, of course, reflexively blame the developers for that appearance, but this is unfair and rather self-serving. The developers are only responding to the asymmetric incentives that people provide with their own reactions. In a society where people will shrug their shoulders over a mind-numbingly bland design, but will shout very loudly indeed, as they believe to be their socially-sanctioned right, to anything that is the slightest bit unexpected, on which side do you honestly expect the developer to err?
Imagine, indeed, that the exact opposite were the case. Imagine how great this country could start to look again if people had a relaxed tolerance to the building of somewhat garish oddities, but went absolutely fucking ape-shit if anyone proposed to build something that showed a total lack of imagination. For me, that's where the red lines should be drawn.
