28 November 2008
the flimsiness of everyday life
Scurrying around the outer reaches of Woolwich and the Greenwich Peninsula yesterday, between hospital and shopping mall, I reflected, not for the first time, on the flimsiness of everyday life. Or, the furniture of New Labour. It is clear that nothing new is ever built well. Contemporary architectural design seems to take its cue from a combination of the Big Brother house and the office of a focus group, all lime green and oranges, loud circles and fun fun fun. Sitting in the Building Centre with Owen the other day, we discussed what it meant, or must mean. Nothing must remind anyone of the past, everything must be perky, like toys for grown-ups. Relational aesthetics as anti-modernism. Architects must make their mark all the way down, designing bespoke fixtures that break almost immediately and are too expensive to replace. Construction is poorly done, and radically unsuitable for the fiddly baroque toy furnishings that characterise the architecture of the past decade. And yet - wildly over-budget, we have a set piece! Think of the added value to the area! How many mini-Bilbao-effects can we set in motion...I remember Clissold Leisure Centre, a catastrophic example of this tendency. Fiddly as hell, incredibly expensive, late, with water from the toilets sloshing into the small pool (or was it the other way round?), the roof of this fragile airport-esque elephant fell in eighteen months after it was completed. I managed in that time to swim there twice, noting on each occasion the depressing obsolescence of fixtures and fittings.
Take another example: the new building at the university I work for. Declared structurally unsound on the day of its opening (and as if to demonstrate its Nu-labouricity, the ribbon was cut by Cherie Blair - or Booth, as she is called in her 'professional' capacity as QC. She promptly had a fight with the journalist John Simpson, who happens to be our Chancellor), several months later it is falling apart. Many of the toilets are out of use, the weak mis-aligned locks don't work and the weird hum that the building seems to generate interrupts student presentations. But still, it looked pretty for five minutes. Who cares if it blows as a teaching block?
For reasons I won't go into, I recently attended my first focus group. In the room with the one-way glass so that we could be observed, the chairs were, of course, lime green and 'fun'. As we performed our duty as good citizens of contradictory information providing, the man who was leading the group ran through a series of 'buzz-words' on a flip-chart. He had misspelled 'concise', one of the words he wanted to think about in relation to the magazine we were discussing. I told him it had right-wing fonts, and a dentist from Hammersmith agreed.
We were allowed little mini bottles of wine, and fun-size chocolate bars. Returning to the brightly coloured blob-splattered main reception, I received £50 in an envelope. Not bad for an hour and a half of murmuring partial, meaningless statements. In Adam Curtis's Century of the Self, in an episode entitled 'Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering', a line describing Nu-Labour focus groups, Draper makes a valid point about the incoherency of such research. Of course people are going to say that they both want better public services and to pay less tax! But is there anything more Nu-Labour than asking people to map out their contradictory desires and then somehow, um, acting on them?
What kind of architecture/design/furniture do people want? Something new! Something bright! Something unique! No sharp lines! Ergonom-icy! Get someone famous in to design some lime green chairs with individual parts that are very hard to mass-produce, wait for them to break, and leave them as they are - broken, obsolete, partial objects of a flimsy future that treats the adults that walk around in it like spoilt children who can't drink their cappuccinos unless their environment resembles a tchotchke from a pointless boutique.
UPDATE: Lara has a great response.
It is true: it fell apart just like everything else these days. Families, banks, children's new toys, the plastic boxes that contain Woolies' discount Christmas cards, Oyster card wallets, the boxes that package 16 tampons, homes, schools, cars (my mother in law's 4-year-old Peugeot engine crumbled after 13,800 miles and they refused to reimburse her or do anything that might have qualified as nice), roll-ups, toasters bought after 1985, taps, shower fittings, colourful china door handles with designs tentatively labelled 'ethnic', John Lewis scales for weighing the human body, slices of bread, universities, tarmac roads, bus stops, unions, job contracts, mobile phones, nations, old ladies' hips, aeroplanes... Guns probably fall apart these days too. Cheap loo roll. Pavements. Language. Laptops. Cemeteries, even.
This list is beautiful. The rest of the post is too, despite - or perhaps because - of its content.
