The Star of the East
There was a pub in Shoreditch…Archive for Architecture
Digital Dreams
When I started out in digital in 1992 I had no intention of getting into advertising or direct marketing or PR. I’d just left St Martins in the middle of a recession with a Graphic Design Degree nobody wanted.
But I had a mad friend from college who was into what he called hypertext. We weren’t novelists or rock stars or movie stars but we wanted to create a new 4 dimensional Art form.
A multilayered novel, a multimedia happening, or a wetware experience.
Village people
There’s nothing new about social networking. The new and unusual development was the fracturing of social networks in the first place, the loss of community. This didn’t happen on an inner city sink estate during the Thatcher years, where communities have survived surprisingly well. I think it started in the groovy, baby boomer 50’s and 60’s when the middle classes rejected their cultural, geographical and religious roots and turned to worship the new God of International Corporate culture. They moved to new neighbourhoods specifically designed to accommodate them and their upwardly mobile friends, where they could host discreet dinner parties and play golf with ‘the right sort of people’. But they lost their original ‘friends and family’ on the way. And if they moved on up, then they made more new friends again [and discarded the last lot]. And I think they were pretty happy with the way it worked. Who wants embarrassing ghosts of their their less prosperous past hanging around?
So if you want your community back, what do you do?
You buy a farmhouse in a charming village in Oxfordshire and join the local Darts team.
And if you can’t afford a farmhouse in a charming village in Oxfordshire?
There’s always facebook.
road dreams: eastern avenue
The thing about the granada scorpio is that you can get the decks and the entire back catalogue of herbie hancock, miles davis, weather report, shakatak, everything on blue note, talking loud, acid jazz, soul jazz, a good helping of the sounds of philly, some dodgy david sylvian lp’s and a bbc sound effects high fidelity gramaphone record into the back and there’s still room for a couple of birds so long as they’re fairly skinny and didn’t bring their fur coats with them you can burn your boats at the pool of london and say good bye to history as you cross tower bridge and head east along the highway to hell past the early breaking international news and by the time you dive into the lime the girls are asleep and they don’t see canary wharf lighting up the future or the fishmarket stinking out the past the millenium mills are still up for grabs and the city airport doesn’t fly by night but the road soars above the back gardens of the blessed and then lands with a roar alongside the last resting place of a thousand used car dealers mini cab graveyard and the bay windows stare stupidly at nothing wave goodbye to ilford island and shoot into pop oblivion underground underwraps underworld too late to go to hollywood terry you can’t swim with the dolphins or dance with the doves it’s pigeon shit city empty bingo hall last traffic light multiplex pizza burger thank god it’s D.I.Y. huts and out into the open fields of the promised land and on into the flat night of the flatlands outstripping white capris that have seen better days catch the tail of the vomit comet last train out of the smokey joke and rave on you crazy 25 diamond geezer the barns are bursting with corny inbred cockney barrowboy sharks running away from the jungle they built in search of the real thing and across the border into folk land dukes of hazard a guess rock and roll virgins where everything is so very old and so very new where the caravans wait patiently for their summer of misspent youth and when we can’t drive any further we park on the seafront the fish and chip shop is shut so we take off our loafers and feel the sand between our toes like so much talcum powder and taste the long weekender salty soul air and make communion with the sea and we’re born again and one of the girls wakes up and says “you’re fucking mad I don’t normally swear but it’s fucking freezing where the fuck are we and where’s my fucking fur coat?”
I can’t stand up for falling down
I don’t know if it’s still true or even if it was true then, but when I was in Cairo in 1983 they told me you didn’t have to pay tax if your building had no roof. And this was the reason why most of the buildings seemed to be either half built or half falling down. The predominant style was the six or seven storey concrete block topped off with a melange of scaffolding, rubble, piles of unused bricks, flying a tattered tarpaulin as a flag.
When I look at the majority of current web design I get the same feeling. It’s just not finished, or worse still, not even started. Random construction lines carve up the screen shifting and vibrating in a most alarming fashion. Words are still kept in boxes, as if their owners were afraid they might fall off or run away. Words in print graphics haven’t been kept locked up like that since cold composed metal typesetting.
The way they arrange the nuts and bolts and planks at Travis Perkins is more elegant, more logical and indeed more user friendly than internet data. One has to admire the workmanlike way in which technical teams have laid out their tools and their raw materials on a site like Amazon, and you have to admire the sheer range and number of nuts and bolts they’ve got but remember this a virtual world. They can give themselves an infinite number of lives just like Space Invaders in your bedroom on Amiga. [up.down.left.right.select.select.fire, all within about a second and half]. But this way of life has no future; look at the number of geeks spending their hard-earned .com cash on treatment for arthritis. We’ve all ended up living in a shantytown living hand to mouth and it’s our own fault.
There are some lovely hand built sheds on the outskirts, built in quaint html vernacular style and some amusing student experiments that go off with a flash and a bang. But nobody has come up with a large-scale design that does any more ambitious than stitching together several bigger sheds and setting off fireworks on the roof. Stig of the Dump has had to be very hard working and versatile to survive in this post apocalyptic vision of the world but he is used to it because most of Shoreditch used to look like that anyway.
However there’s a Pizza Express on Curtain Road now and girls in combat gear wandering around looking for the delicatessen and somewhere to buy lipstick. It’s a shame that the first big surge of cash was all used up in vain attempts to build the biggest, tallest, dirtiest pile of junk. Nobody thought of putting in plumbing and first fix electric’s, The Radiant City doesn’t exist, only old fragmented, imperfect, improvised buildings. But that shouldn’t stop us from making plans and models and dreaming of the next big thing. A recession.
space
Give me some space! Outer space, wide open space, personal space, defensible space, urban space, live-work space, 3d space, white space, pictorial space, flat space, letter space, parking space, web space, sacred space, workspace, conceptual space, space dust, air space, space cadet, space time continuum, make space, warp space, colour space, space age, space invaders, space writer, space filler.
I could forgiven for thinking that we had something going with this space stuff, yet despite the talk no-one seems to be acting as if they love space very much. In fact I would say the opposite is true; the overriding zeitgeist seems to be a general fear of wide open spaces, a kind of communal agoraphobia.
All we want to do is plug into our homes and soak up our low fat lager and New World wine with our free home delivery user-friendly curried interactive microwave vitamin enriched organic TV pizza. We want to take refuge from the jobs, which involve meeting people and learning, that we do to earn the pizza money and the membership fees for the gym where we work off the pizza. Stay indoors!
Space the final frontier. Space travel for all is becoming too close to a reality; people prefer the romance of made up space travel; it’s no mistake that the Star Wars chronology is stuck in reverse gear. Collectors would much prefer to spend the ill-gotten gains of the Information Industry on misinformation, the made-up rubbish that gave misguided optimism to their youth. Nobody is interested in the present, especially when it’s January and it’s raining.
Minimal spaces, urban places where beauty is measured by the square foot, look good in pictures but it’s very hard on the staff (you don’t clean your own loft do you?) Great to see letter-spacing back after its heyday in 1980’s when, like shoulder pads and hair lacquer; you just put in loads and you couldn’t go wrong. But it did go wrong, didn’t it? perhaps there is a correlation between the gaps in between the letters and the state of the economy. The spaces get bigger and bigger and bigger, and then pop, the bubble bursts. White space doesn’t seem such hot proposition for revival, maybe because it used to imply acres of very expensive paper stock with nothing on it.
Is it really necessary to put every thing you know now or have ever known on the front page of your web site? It didn’t make money or sense then and it won’t make money or sense now. There’s plenty of time; just because 2001 Space Odyssey is no longer science fiction but merely quaint fiction doesn’t mean you will miss the bus to the future if you don’t book now. You know full well that there soon won’t be any more buses anyway.
So start walking now [walking, not running] take your time, follow any interesting detours you might meet along the way. Be the tortoise, and wave to the hares as they roar past in their Ferrari’s they may need your help later. If you don’t have anything to say why not express yourself with the majesty of silence, don’t say anything. If you don’t have any pictures, then why go to the trouble of finding some when it only eats up bandwidth. The D&AD award for the most stylish presentation of a telephone number on a commercial site goes to…Space on the internet is free, enjoy it.
road dreams: westway
For not much more than 20 bucks you can fill your big old American car full of gas and drive across Texas for 9 hours straight without stopping or turning or blinking, and never see a soul except the shadow of a good old boy in the tinted windscreen of a shiny big Mack truck, or a Stetson in the back of a two door coupe the size of a boat and twice as rusty, with only the fantastic mountains for company, painted in flat shades of earth by a desperate dali, that never never get any closer and never go away. Jack rabbits and skunk and antelope take their chances on the asphalt roulette, chased by the little twisters of the mother of a storm, and the vultures pick off the remains of the dead tyres that 18 wheelers shed along the way. For sale, for sale, sing the boards on the roadhouses and shacks and vacant lots; good home needed for a family of 4 Airstream trailers grazing a barren paddock next to a restaurant sign that is bigger than the restaurant. Things you only dream about, or see in movies, big silver things in the sky, the roadrunner, cowboys riding bareback chasing trains that whistle in the middle of the night taking steel cattle coffins of T bones to the golden arches in the east, that house out of the film Giant, and the mysterious Marfa lights; creeks with no water and towns with no people and roads with no end and tumbleweed. and the sky turns black and blue and purple and red and gold and the horizon comes down to swallow the road and you drive on into the black velvet and you are alone in your car, until the glow comes up again, and 50 miles outside El Paso you see the lights on the Mexican side of the border spread out over the desert like a vast lake of people that is getting ready to flood over the border and steal cars and eat tacos and wait tables and mop floors and clean cars, shine shoes and shovel shit. Y’all c’mon, welcome to America.
