In what parallel world is the country more advanced than the city?

[imomus]

I'm a city person. I almost never want to leave the city, although I think I like nature. Thinking of the city as more advanced than the country is second nature to me. The city is the crucible of almost all interesting new ideas; the country gets diluted, conservative versions of them decades or even centuries later. People who live in the country, research tells us, are cautious and conservative, tending to preserve traditions at the expense of new developments.

But, first of all, is this still true in an age when the internet brings interesting ideas to us pretty much wherever we are? When gentech experiments are covering the countryside with freakishly new plant species? And secondly, could we imagine a parallel world where the countryside is actually more advanced than the city? I'm thinking of a song Peter Blasser of The Gongs made which imagined a super-experimental countryside full of geodesic domes. Or of the Modernist glass-walled country house in Evelyn Waugh's "Decline and Fall" (which the conservative Waugh wanted to mock, of course, but I pictured in my head as something wonderful when I read it).

In fact, some of my favourite images ever are pictures of super-advanced ideas -- ultra-modern houses, for instance -- set in "unspoiled" rural landscapes. Last week I rented the DVD of Goff in the Desert, a film which documents all of Bruce Goff's amazing spacey-organic buildings in their suburban and country locations. Their weird originality blows away most of what any city can offer. (In the commentary, though, director Heinz Emigholz makes it clear that the desert of his title is a metaphorical one -- Goff's inventiveness is very much the exception in suburban and rural America.)



Whenever an "advanced" building pops up in the country, though, it's financed from the city, occupied by a city-dweller or worker who wants a retreat, driven to from the city, and built by an architect who studied in the city. The ferment of ideas that created the building is one that the conservative countryside itself could never provide.

Let's take an example. Kathryn Findlay is a Scottish architect, a graduate of London's AA, who's spent a lot of her working life in Tokyo making, in collaboration with her then-husband Eisaku Ushida, radical houses like the Truss Wall House and the Soft and Hairy House. Findlay has most recently been working on the amazing Grafton New Hall, a starfish-shaped country house in Cheshire.

Findlay talks in an interview with Sarah Dunant archived on the BBC's site about her influences. She grew up in the countryside in Scotland, the daughter of a sheep farmer. "That's where I got my interest in landscape," she says. "I don't see architecture as defined by walls, but by walking and paths and routes through landscape... It's easy to start with a box and fill it in. but if you start with the notion of a route through a solid form, then you excavate the space out of it, conceptually it's a different starting point, so it's harder to get there."

Now, this is certainly a response to a country upbringing, but it's also full of the kind of Situationism and Psychogeography Findlay must have encountered in London at the Architecture Association. She's also been crucially influenced by her twenty years in Japan (she's back in Scotland now). Not just her work with Japanese architects like Arata Isozaki and her husband. "The Japanese tea ceremony, calligraphy, they're not derived from fine arts," she says; in Japan "all the arts come from the way people live. It's not a visually-led culture. It combines all of the senses. People get inspiration from sound, from scent, from texture, and they combine it in a way that Western architecture traditionally hasn't done to the same extent."

The dialectic between city and country is clear in Findlay's own career, but it's also built into the tradition of the British country house she's now inserting her radical Cheshire starfish house into. It's being constructed -- at a cost of about £20 million -- by entrepreneur Mel Hood, who's decided to start building it without having found a buyer. Initially, at least, it will be his own home.



"Grafton New Hall will be the most important residential building of its time," Hood told Manchester Online. "This design is one of the first country houses to be given planning permission since a Department of Environment edict issued in 1997 that insists only houses of 'outstanding architectural quality' can be built in the countryside."

Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian explains that shocking restriction further:

"This extraordinary design is, in fact, one of the first country houses to be given planning permission since John Gummer's PPG7, a Department of Environment edict issued in 1997. This insists that houses can be built in the countryside only if they are of "outstanding architectural quality". Mr Gummer's edict was, in part, a reaction to the property boom of the 1980s when kitsch houses financed by instant City fortunes spread across rural shires. Since Mr Gummer's edict, few country houses have been built. This is not for a lack of potential patrons, but for a lack of suitable land. Those in pursuit of a perfect country retreat wish to build in the very tracts of unspoilt land that the department has been determined to save from inappropriate development."

Glancey quotes Findlay's argument for the radicalism of the countryside: "Traditionally, the great English country house was long a radical building type - think of buildings like Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire or Holkham Hall on the north Norfolk coast: they must have seemed astonishing at the time of their construction. Our house might seem a little out of this world, but in a sense it's connecting the English country house back to its tradition of innovation as well as connoisseurship."

Mel Hood agrees. "New money from the towns has always flowed into the country because of the prestige and privacy that a country house affords, so Grafton New Hall is in line with this 'heritage of progressive architecture'. Hailed as "a remarkable attempt to redefine a form of domestic architecture", the intention is for the house to blend effortlessly into its surroundings and be as "ecologically responsible" as possible."

But Alan Powers in The Spectator doesn't buy these arguments that today's innovation is tomorrow's tradition. He thinks Kathryn Findlay's design is more like a discarded pizza box than a natural, self-effacing starfish. "The bad side of 'a heritage of progressive architecture' in country houses is that it has nothing to do with the country (and the same goes for any architectural style), and everything to do with status and display".

The same goes for any architectural style? What, there should be no building at all in the country? Mankind is a vain strutting peacock and should be shut up in the city's zoo?

I want to give the last word to Glancey. "Innovative English country houses have been as rare as hen's teeth since the 1930s," he says. "Many observers believed the building type had come to its natural end with the second world war and the meltdown of the traditional class structure."

Could it be that there hasn't been a countryside "more advanced than the city" since Feudal times, when society's most dynamic and cosmopolitan class was the aristocracy, those country-dwelling, Ming-importing clipper-setters?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

One need never leave the
confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes -- I can't
even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway
handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not
totally regret life.

--Frank O'Hara, "Meditations in an Emergency"

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Whimsy's going to be furious with Frank for saying that!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But does it still apply when

a) To afford New York rent you have to do things which will totally make you "regret life"?

and

b) Your "local" record store is Amazon.com?

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. New York in the sixties! When I grew up there it was all so cheap. All my parents' friends were incredulous that they were staying in the city. But they did, and it was great.

[(Anonymous)]

Although New York remains, in the general scheme of things, a wildly interesting place, it is nonetheless at its least interesting since about the late 19th century. You can say much the same about the other major Western cities too. You can certainly say it about Paris, and maybe about London. The reason, I think, is that these cities are extraordinary wealth magnets, and wealth accumulation inevitably leads to the physical and cultural sanitization of a city. It's not necessarily true that the big cities are so much more progressive than elsewhere (cf. the Starbuckisation of New York and London); they're only more progressive at a certain point of their historical cycle.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

wealth accumulation inevitably leads to the physical and cultural sanitization of a city

I'm not sure if that's so, or whether sanitization and experimentalism might not go hand-in-hand. I don't, for instance, agree with people who say that New York has to be dangerous to be great, and that the good old days were when the Lower East Side was a no-go area. And sure, London has more Starbucks and looks more like anywhere (Anywhere USA, perhaps) than it used to, but it still has institutions like the Architecture Association which are crucibles of radical ideas, and encourage people to grapple with some of the most interesting stuff being thought anywhere. Perhaps AA students even go to Starbucks sometimes! (The coffee couldn't be any worse than the stuff the AA cafe sells.)

Also, what I tend to see is these "advanced projects" like Findlay's house, or SANAA's New Museum in New York, being possible precisely only where there are large accumulations of wealth. Look at Mel Hood with twenty million quid to burn on a starfish. Innovation doesn't necessarily depend on huge unfair wealth distribution, but it certainly helps people like Kathryn turn their sketches into vast built habitable things. And the radical thing is not the sketch, it's the actual living processes that unfold inside that star, how it sits in the landscape, and so on.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I think the physical appearance of a city is important, and the fact that all London high streets look the same now, and what's more, they all look the same as provincial high streets as well, is telling. There's been a cultural flattening out between the capital and the provinces. Sure, the big cities have the big institutions. And therefore have the power to drive big institutional change. But, increasingly, not the bottom-to-top changes. What we'll be listening to and looking at and dressing like in the future will have less and less to do with London and New York. And more to do with cities at a different point of their cycle, with a different dynamic of wealth accumulation, in China or in Latin America or in India, for example. We're all familiar with the notion of bohemian neighbourhoods culturally "dying" when they become too gentrified; I think there's a similar dynamic at the international level as well.

damn!

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I was typing up my tarot deck and thinking about Sartre. Would he be a good typist? And I had a flash. I thought "I bet momus writes about Sartre in today's entry." But I was wrong

I think Sartre's insistence on constant re-invention would make him skilled at typing the unfamiliar, but he'd be pretty lousy as a typist in general, I think, because speed in typing is all about the fingers going where they've been many times before

And as for more topical matters,
this

reminds me of this

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What we'll be listening to and looking at and dressing like in the future will have less and less to do with London and New York. And more to do with cities at a different point of their cycle, with a different dynamic of wealth accumulation, in China or in Latin America or in India, for example.

Oh, sure, I'm with you on that. But I think it's precisely because they're accumulating wealth that India and China are able to change things. Thinking about UNESCO's work earlier this week (and in an article I wrote for Wired, which will run on Tuesday), I came to the conclusion that while their "corrective" work is important, it's economic dynamism that will really counter the hub-and-spoke imperialism we've seen over the last sixty years. That "one world, one operating system" thing actually generates the conditions of its own dissolution, perhaps.

[(Anonymous)]

The city just makes you more progressive. With new buildings going up all the time, you start to see the world as an ever-changing place. In the country, that field and stream by your house have been there since time immemorial.

In the country, the people you come across are probably members of your own income group. You're not alternately walking by giant towers and homeless people every day. You're less exposed to differences of all sorts. As cities grow and became more cosmopolitan, it becomes harder to maintain a feeling that who you are and your ideas of "truth" are absolute.

A progressive-minded person like Whimsy can live in the country but his outlook and level of learning are not typical of a country dweller.

Re: damn!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The only thing I thought about Sartre this week was in relation to Clive James, who's just published his autobiography (http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0714,indiana,76229,10.html) and spends a lot of it hating on Sartre. And I thought, well, if odious smarmy Clive is still being needled and stung by Sartre, old google-eyes is still doing good work, even from the grave.

the country and the city

[(Anonymous)]

We touched on these sort of ideas in my Asian Aesthetics class this week - we 're starting to talk people about people like Lao Tzu and Taoist praise for nature. One of these people said centuries ago "If you live in the city, you'll spend too much time thinking about your hair". I couldn't agree more! I agree with the poster above who thought New York was at its least interesting - it seems more and more a museum of the past, especially past failing technologies. Perhaps the city will become feasible again when we get rid of the private automobile and adopt a more humane pace. A recent visit to a Mexican tourist village revealed a walkable town, height limits on new construction, and electric eco-trucks and bicycle carts delivering the daily food; we have a lot to learn from these people.

Re: the country and the city

[(Anonymous)]

There are height restrictions in San Francisco and its suburbs. Good luck finding an affordable place there.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well...I have a wife, nearby in-laws, friends visiting from Philly, huge trees and young gardens (including the curious plants across the street that the Turkish family tend), every imaginable plant on my windowsills and terrariums, my bookshelves are full, I've plenty of fish, my cat and my clients are always underfoot, the squirrels wake me up by skittering across my roof, and are always outfoxing my birdfeeder countermeasures, the neighbor's cat is always trying to get into my house, and my neighborhood is swarming with kids, birds, cats, and dogs--none of which is mediated. Like everyone else here, I'm surrounded by life, thank you very much, Frank.

Some people go to the city to evade life, too.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

I like those giant, white windmills they've started putting up in the countryside. I also like the idea of the countryside being filled with futuristic architecture.
but I also like the those manor houses with thier renaissance paintings and Art Nouveau furniture, and the quaint little cottages.

I guess I'm just sick of semi-detached houses here in London...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The city can ossify a mind just as much as foundering in the provinces can. I find that I often have to "edit" myself when chatting with bien pensant urbanites who often don't realize how intolerant they actually are. One can run into people who are just as smug, doctrinaire and easily offended as one might find in the sticks--it can be stifling to be in their company.

In contrast, my electrician neighbor is reliably pleasant: He could give a damn about what my moustache "signifies", and his boys dig my highwheel. These things can bring snarky, hypercritical comments in a city, but the humble disapsorans I live among just shrug and say, "Yeah, he's a little odd, but that's just Al". But then, I've always lived among blue-collar sorts--the upper-middle suburban tightasses are a different species altogether. Wasteful, sterile, bitchy, anxious, bad taste--I can't possibly defend them. I suspect their children are the more odious sort of urbanites I'd mentioned a moment ago.

I couldn't possibly do what I do for a living without my computer and modem; I can chat with my agent and work on fun projects for world-renowned museums, yet still enjoy my garden (this means no commuting). New York is where I visit friends and bring my pigs to market, but I couldn't live as richly there as I can here. My idea of luxury is too intertwined with rare frogs and bog orchids.

I love the energy, the richness, the density, the improvisation, the innovation of New York--I spend a good deal of time there. I'm just waiting for it to evolve into something a bit more humane, perhaps one might say, modern.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I also find that, just like the country bumpkins who come into the city and act like bulls in a china shop, so can urbanites when you take them into a natural setting. They are so accustomed to turbulence, shrill spectacle, mediation and externalized living that they cannot be still and quiet, introspective. I suspect some people are ill at ease in an environment that isn't all about them.

Few seem respectful of the fact that while a city takes a mere century to establish, the most humble insect takes millions of years to come about. People can become coarsened by their urban environs, and unable to appreciate the joy of just being, just as much as the bumpkins can be blind to the joys of thinking.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

But if you're living in a city, how do you know? ;)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

...which is another way of saying that the country is indeed more advanced in many respects, just not in the ways most urbanites recognize.

[deadbatteries.livejournal.com]

appiah says the countryside (and plenty of so-called "backwards" countries) can be in fact equally as cosmopolitan as we think large cities are, mainly because no culture has ever been as unspoiled as we've ever made it out to be, and there's always a mix. the trick to being cosmopolitan, however, is perhaps realizing this mix, and not thinking that west + the rest = cosmopolitan (perhaps it's more rest+rest=cosmopolitan).

i think it's interesting how many utopias center themselves in rural areas, away from cities. there's a certain amount of utopianism going into the desire to create strange buildings in rural areas -- it seems anti-cosmopolitan in the sense that it attempts to separate itself from the buildings of the city, yet at the same time it is trying to create a new world that is distinctly cosmopolitan in the way it tries to juxtapose two supposedly contrasting elements against each other and create a new landscape of cosmopolitanism. i dunno. i think it reflects the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism (which has a place/which has no place).

Hail the New Diasporans!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Some of my very favorite people (http://angeliska.livejournal.com/) live beyond the metro centers. In an age of internet, high real estate prices and decaying small town centers, why not? Do you want mere diversity, or divergence?

What would Marx say?

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

He'd say:

"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."

Hmm...

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

As a Devonian I have encountered the kind of urbanite prejudices that you mention. When I go back home to Devon I find people refreshing oblivious to things like status. You don't have to make a diary appointment just to see friends. No one is trying to be someone. It's great. Up here in London (http://youtube.com/watch?v=rJdVzc1Jhfc) people tend to look at you like you're just one more rung in the ladder they're intent on climbing.

Anyway, I think you have expressed the comparitive pros and cons of urban and rural better than I could have.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the American experiment in a nutshell: This country was at one time a bizarre patchwork of utopian experiments--some religious, some intellectual. Different, beliefs, customs, dialects, traditions.

I think the anti-cosmopolitanism you've described is indeed just cosmopolitanism starting anew, breaking from an ossified shell. I play with juxtaposing disparate ideas--the 'rustic dandy'--to see which qualities fall aside and which become more robust and form something new, something I can enrich my life with. I couldn't do this in a circumscribed environment (define 'circumscribed', right?). Context limits one's appropriations, especially a context which goes against one's proclivities.

The countryside may not be as "sophisticated" as an urban center, but it is far more intricate in texture. In some ways, urbanization is a process of simplification, switching out intricate, organic processes for crude, mechanistic ones. I hope this might change in the future--the city I would love to live in has not yet been made.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I feel I should add that my life in Devon, as a member of Wolf and Water Arts Company (http://www.wolfandwater.org) was much more Bohemian, progressive and human than any lifestyle I have been able to have in the cities I have lived in since that time.