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imomusThis time last week I was staying with Craig and Krista on the Byker Wall estate in Newcastle. My sense of deja vu at Byker is perfectly explicable: I'd seen an Open University documentary about the estate years ago, and remembered how it turned its brick back wall to the motorway and, on its green inner side, filled the space with elevated walkways, brightly-coloured roofs, balconies and playgrounds.
The colours on Byker were refreshing, and there was a good feeling, some kind of mixture between the humane and the futuristic, some vision of a social utopia based on harmony and community, high density and state provision.
Here's the Byker design team -- led by Ralph Erskine, seen on the left -- at work on the project in the 1970s. Byker Wall went on to win lots of design awards and get a Grade II* listed status, but Erskine made only one other significant building in Britain, the London Ark in Hammersmith. His company, Erskine Tovatt, was based in Sweden, and his ideas are perhaps more Swedish (or, in a wider sense, European) than British (or, in a wider sense, Anglo-American). Which is to say that they're essentially social democratic and statist rather than libertarian-individualist.
Erskine died in 2005 at the age of 91, but he still stands for certain ideas which I wanted to contrast today with the ideas of another ethical building pioneer, Michael Reynolds. Let's watch a clip of a documentary about Byker, then a clip about Michael Reynolds.
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Now here's a trailer for Garbage Warrior, the new film about sustainable architecture guru Reynolds. I was turned onto this by Joe and Emma, who are about to move to Aberdeen, and have been thinking about getting an allotment and growing their own vegetables. They're very interested in finding sustainable buildings in the Reynolds style in the UK (there are a few, apparently). Emma talks about Reynolds here. Anyway, here's the trailer for the film they saw about him:
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When I was visiting Glasgow, I expressed some reservations to Joe about Reynolds' style. I think his utopia and Erskine's are very different. It's the difference between communal solutions and libertarian ones.
"Just because you're hooked up to a municipal water system and power system, it doesn't mean that those things are always going to be there," says one occupant of a Reynolds sustainable house. It's hard to imagine what kind of cataclysm would make communal water and power systems unavailable to modern people, or what kind of paranoia could make you organize your life around it, but this mindset -- whether realistic or not -- is a classically American one. It ties in with a whole set of pioneer and maverick and outlaw imagery -- essentially individualist imagery, basically Protestant and even apocalyptic. End times are on the way, Christ is coming back, only the saved -- who've retreated to self-contained communities out in the wilderness -- will surivive, blah blah blah.
So, when we look at Reynolds fighting the government to get his admirably sustainable buildings legally recognised, we can't help thinking of the Waco siege, of survivalists and revivalists who see law and government as their enemies, of settlers moving Westwards in a typically-American quest for riches and "manifest destiny". Behind the idea of a self-sufficient building is the idea that society and the state cannot be trusted, and ought to be shunned. It's every man for himself out there!
This "devil take the hindmost" attitude couldn't be further from Erskine's European vision of social architecture, in which the state is a benign provider, and basic power and water and communications networks are assumed to be there in pretty much every possible scenario. Instead of withdrawing from social networks, Erskine's vision draws people closer towards them.
Rather than the state and the law, Erskine's demon is the car. The Byker Estate turns a frosty brick wall on the nearby motorway, and the planning assumes that cars will be left at the edges, and that in the centre and up on the skyways people will walk, and children will play.
Erskine was a community architect, which means that he got the people who were going to live on the estate involved in the design, even though the state was responsible for funding (as it now is for restoring Byker) and he signed off on the aesthetics.
There's an interesting pdf of a talk he gave which describes Erskine's feelings about the libertarian-individualist-commercial landscapes of America. He basically rejects Robert Venturi's idea that we can "learn from Las Vegas" (and Venturi's 1972 book is absolutely central to postmodernism, and to the idea that we can get something positive from the sprawl of capitalist anarchism):
"Venturi talks of learning from Las Vegas," says Erskine. "Clearly his experience of this settlement differs totally from mine. Are we just different people or are we from different cultures? Do we learn very different things? I came to Las Vegas as should be –- over the desert pass in the evening light and there in the sterile desert valley glittered the “Best Nest of Sin in the World”, fulfilling all my expectations for intensive enjoyment of visual stimulation and moral indignation.
"I should have turned and left -- not to avoid sin but to avoid disillusionment. Las Vegas and the “five mile strip” was for me only a mess and a dreadful bore of tatty hotels and tatty churches and tatty parking lots, sporadic neon and bored disillusioned people pulling on endless rows of one-armed bandits in tatty hotel foyers. All sadness and no fun. If there is any point in sin it should surely be entertaining?"
He goes on to contrast Las Vegas with high-density development in Japan: "Compared with the Ginza, Shinjuku or Asakusa in Tokyo, it was for me boringly provincial, incompetent and ugly and most townships in the deserts were poor variations on a similar theme. I have suffered similar disappointments in Florida. It was NOT my model for architecture or community planning, but since my delight is a world of differing cultures I could hope that Americans are happy with -- and with greater success can cultivate -- the American city, but equally I could hope that in Europe we can appreciate and revive many of the undeniable and most specific qualities of cities of the Old World.
"Not for me however, are the Baroque town plans of Europe or the Imperial city of ancient Peking –- those expressions of might. I would find the medieval city more apt for democracy should I seek a model. In these we find individual buildings expressing great power, but the city is the result of and expresses a multitude of decisions and therefore a multitude of varying situations, experiences, usefulness and creates the aesthetic of discovery and surprise."
The dense medieval city -- like Ginza or Asakusa -- is a place where people seek thoroughly social utopias. Rather than fleeing to the desert to escape the wicked cities of humankind and await the cleansing destructions of some promised god, they find a political solution in the organisation of people. Rather than separation they seek togetherness.
Sustainability means density, not sprawl. It means cities and networks, not flight to the desert. Rather than dropping out of grids and networks, we should be opting in. Rather than Las Vegas, we should be learning from Shinjuku and Shakespeare's Southwark.
The colours on Byker were refreshing, and there was a good feeling, some kind of mixture between the humane and the futuristic, some vision of a social utopia based on harmony and community, high density and state provision.
Here's the Byker design team -- led by Ralph Erskine, seen on the left -- at work on the project in the 1970s. Byker Wall went on to win lots of design awards and get a Grade II* listed status, but Erskine made only one other significant building in Britain, the London Ark in Hammersmith. His company, Erskine Tovatt, was based in Sweden, and his ideas are perhaps more Swedish (or, in a wider sense, European) than British (or, in a wider sense, Anglo-American). Which is to say that they're essentially social democratic and statist rather than libertarian-individualist.
Erskine died in 2005 at the age of 91, but he still stands for certain ideas which I wanted to contrast today with the ideas of another ethical building pioneer, Michael Reynolds. Let's watch a clip of a documentary about Byker, then a clip about Michael Reynolds.
[Error: unknown template video]
Now here's a trailer for Garbage Warrior, the new film about sustainable architecture guru Reynolds. I was turned onto this by Joe and Emma, who are about to move to Aberdeen, and have been thinking about getting an allotment and growing their own vegetables. They're very interested in finding sustainable buildings in the Reynolds style in the UK (there are a few, apparently). Emma talks about Reynolds here. Anyway, here's the trailer for the film they saw about him:
[Error: unknown template video]
When I was visiting Glasgow, I expressed some reservations to Joe about Reynolds' style. I think his utopia and Erskine's are very different. It's the difference between communal solutions and libertarian ones.
"Just because you're hooked up to a municipal water system and power system, it doesn't mean that those things are always going to be there," says one occupant of a Reynolds sustainable house. It's hard to imagine what kind of cataclysm would make communal water and power systems unavailable to modern people, or what kind of paranoia could make you organize your life around it, but this mindset -- whether realistic or not -- is a classically American one. It ties in with a whole set of pioneer and maverick and outlaw imagery -- essentially individualist imagery, basically Protestant and even apocalyptic. End times are on the way, Christ is coming back, only the saved -- who've retreated to self-contained communities out in the wilderness -- will surivive, blah blah blah.
So, when we look at Reynolds fighting the government to get his admirably sustainable buildings legally recognised, we can't help thinking of the Waco siege, of survivalists and revivalists who see law and government as their enemies, of settlers moving Westwards in a typically-American quest for riches and "manifest destiny". Behind the idea of a self-sufficient building is the idea that society and the state cannot be trusted, and ought to be shunned. It's every man for himself out there!
This "devil take the hindmost" attitude couldn't be further from Erskine's European vision of social architecture, in which the state is a benign provider, and basic power and water and communications networks are assumed to be there in pretty much every possible scenario. Instead of withdrawing from social networks, Erskine's vision draws people closer towards them.
Rather than the state and the law, Erskine's demon is the car. The Byker Estate turns a frosty brick wall on the nearby motorway, and the planning assumes that cars will be left at the edges, and that in the centre and up on the skyways people will walk, and children will play.Erskine was a community architect, which means that he got the people who were going to live on the estate involved in the design, even though the state was responsible for funding (as it now is for restoring Byker) and he signed off on the aesthetics.
There's an interesting pdf of a talk he gave which describes Erskine's feelings about the libertarian-individualist-commercial landscapes of America. He basically rejects Robert Venturi's idea that we can "learn from Las Vegas" (and Venturi's 1972 book is absolutely central to postmodernism, and to the idea that we can get something positive from the sprawl of capitalist anarchism):
"Venturi talks of learning from Las Vegas," says Erskine. "Clearly his experience of this settlement differs totally from mine. Are we just different people or are we from different cultures? Do we learn very different things? I came to Las Vegas as should be –- over the desert pass in the evening light and there in the sterile desert valley glittered the “Best Nest of Sin in the World”, fulfilling all my expectations for intensive enjoyment of visual stimulation and moral indignation.
"I should have turned and left -- not to avoid sin but to avoid disillusionment. Las Vegas and the “five mile strip” was for me only a mess and a dreadful bore of tatty hotels and tatty churches and tatty parking lots, sporadic neon and bored disillusioned people pulling on endless rows of one-armed bandits in tatty hotel foyers. All sadness and no fun. If there is any point in sin it should surely be entertaining?"He goes on to contrast Las Vegas with high-density development in Japan: "Compared with the Ginza, Shinjuku or Asakusa in Tokyo, it was for me boringly provincial, incompetent and ugly and most townships in the deserts were poor variations on a similar theme. I have suffered similar disappointments in Florida. It was NOT my model for architecture or community planning, but since my delight is a world of differing cultures I could hope that Americans are happy with -- and with greater success can cultivate -- the American city, but equally I could hope that in Europe we can appreciate and revive many of the undeniable and most specific qualities of cities of the Old World.
"Not for me however, are the Baroque town plans of Europe or the Imperial city of ancient Peking –- those expressions of might. I would find the medieval city more apt for democracy should I seek a model. In these we find individual buildings expressing great power, but the city is the result of and expresses a multitude of decisions and therefore a multitude of varying situations, experiences, usefulness and creates the aesthetic of discovery and surprise."
The dense medieval city -- like Ginza or Asakusa -- is a place where people seek thoroughly social utopias. Rather than fleeing to the desert to escape the wicked cities of humankind and await the cleansing destructions of some promised god, they find a political solution in the organisation of people. Rather than separation they seek togetherness.
Sustainability means density, not sprawl. It means cities and networks, not flight to the desert. Rather than dropping out of grids and networks, we should be opting in. Rather than Las Vegas, we should be learning from Shinjuku and Shakespeare's Southwark.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 12:41 am (UTC)Its funny to see the interviewed guy going on about Erskine's buildings like some crazy person from outer space made them up from his crazy insane genius mind when they are exactly what you see everywhere in central-northern europe. "A birdhouse!Crazy!"
Which is pretty cool. The thing about the building facing away from the motorway so much that theres only toilet windows there is a neat twist - it can be escapist or realist depending on one's humours but if i lived there id like it like that on my free days.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 04:23 am (UTC)That's the point: this sort of thing does happen in North America (floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, Katrina). Ask someone whose mother lived in a cabin when she was young.
Your values are colored by your environment: What might work in a cozy Euro enclave might get you killed elsewhere in the world, and you'd do well to be mindful of that fact.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 06:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 09:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 09:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 08:32 am (UTC)BIG thank you for writing about 'our' Byker and nice pics too!
'Ympari mennaan, yhteen tullaan' = what goes around comes around..
Hope to see you again some day, maybe in my cool-wunderfull-and
weird-Finland !!!
- Krista -
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 08:37 am (UTC)-Krista-
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 09:11 am (UTC)There are more pictures of your Byker pad on my Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/imomus/).
I already blogged about Hel-Looks here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/156191.html).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 09:47 am (UTC)A lot of the social housing that was built in the sixties and seventies failed, though. It ended up doing the opposite of what was intended - creating ghettoes of poverty in the cities, with lots of alienating, windswept concrete plazas and deadspace. "Communal" space soon becomes a scary, graffitied no-man's-land. The idea of imposing community doesn't always seem to work. It's no coincidence that social housing was the locus of riots in 80s England or 90s France.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 11:29 am (UTC)Amber (resident in the Side gallery / cinema, as mentioned) films' "Byker" (1983) is well worth taking into consideration here - very much from the perspective of the residents as the estate was being created. There is a strong sense of the old working-class community spirit's gradual loss; many rueful reflections. Clearly more to do with deeper social changes than to do with Erskine's excellent housing, though the film doesn't tackle that head on...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 01:38 pm (UTC)...except that , in contrast to the Uk in the 60s, the Erskine model has far greater participation of the people who are actually going to live there. I think what people like Erskine are doing is creating a context for the project, rather than dictating every detail from above.
As John Thackara, an exponent of 'designing WITH rather than designing FOR' mentality, says:
"Show me a city with a 'dynamic image' and I will show you an unsustainable city. 'Dynamic' usually means high entropy buildings, financial speculation on a massive scale, and a low degree of social participation. From now on, the most interesting cities will be those whose citizens are able to invest their energy and creativity on 're-inhabitation' within the unique ecosystems of their place. This approach will often involve adaptive or more intense uses of existing infrastructure rather than the construction of signature buildings - and sometimes this approach will mean building nothing, nothing at all. To live sustainably we need to place more value on the here and now: a lot of destruction is caused when design is obsessed with the there, and the next - and the 'dynamic'."
I think that sums it up, really.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 10:29 am (UTC)One of the problems with the mindset of sustainability in architecture is the use of ecology and nature as a measure of “bad”. It leads to legitimisations of socio-political agendas at both extremes, either self-delusional denial or acquiescence of the idea of a present that lacks a future, neither of which are projective or productive, or lead to “good” architecture.
There’s no denying that in the United States there is this mentality that ecological utopia somehow exists amongst the rustic wilderness. Blame Jefferson, whose promotion of the wholesome pastoral way of life, claiming the city as “pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man”, attributed to the anti-urban prejudice embedded in the American (rural) psyche. It is this same Thoreauvian desire however that “led to sprawl, malls, and cougar attacks”.
Though it’s convenient to set up this usual dichotomy of the “libertarian-individualist-commercial landscapes of America” vs. the social democratic, collective bodies of Europe/Japan for the sake of your own agendum (which might be to fight Ayn Rand’s ghost), but you can also find social, sustainable practices throughout America… not just Portland, but as any urban living condition (http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_01cities); in being urban architecture makes it social and sustainable architecture (That’s your point, no?). In that respect - as an architect, Reynolds’ position on sustainability is a minority one. Which is also to say, don’t you think American architects moved on from ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ a while ago?
What gets me, I guess, is the “commercial” part… Félix Guattari asks us to look at Japan: “the prototypical model of new capitalist subjectivities. Not enough emphasis has been placed on the fact that one of the essential ingredients of the miracle mix showcased for visitors to Japan is that the collective subjectivity produced there on a massive scale combines the highest of the “high-tech” components [read: commercial fetishism] with feudalisms and archaisms inherited from the mists of time. Once again, we find the reterritorialising function of an ambiguous monotheism – Shinto-Buddhism, a mix of animism and universal powers – contributing to the establishment of a flexible formula for subjectification going far beyond the triadic framework of capitalist Christian paths/voices. We have a lot to learn!”
Which is to say of Japan: you can have your social utopia, and have your pachinko too.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 12:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 11:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 11:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 12:08 pm (UTC)Hurrah, the world turns working class! Why do we need special projects - just talk to your neighbours. Hang on the stoop, or shoot a hoop outside the corner store. Isn't this highly-managed kind of 'togetherness' just a kind of 'mutual exclusivity' for the middle classes?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 12:36 pm (UTC)Are there solo artists in a social utopia?
Date: 2008-07-29 06:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 01:11 pm (UTC)The city is also a manifestation of "progress." It represents a certain philosophy--that man is progressing by way of increased mechanization and large-scale industry. You don't have dense cities unless you have large corporations operating with the benefits of economies of scale. Even if your large employer is the state, the situation is the same. You are working only for a large, indifferent, faceless entity.
Think about Tokugawa and Meiji Japan (90% rural). You had a farm or a family-run shop. You took pride in your work because, even if you were merely an attendant at an inn, the business represented your family name. The food you ate every day was locally grown. You went to the bath or hot springs at least once a day. You walked every day in a natural setting. That sounds like a pretty substantial life to me.
When life is simplified, you appreciate its basic aspects that much more. You are saying, in effect, that nothing could please you more than to savor a good meal, a nice hot bath, or a walk in nature. The modern city says that other things are more important--industrial development, fast and convenient transportation, modern entertainment--TV, computer, etc.
hey
Date: 2008-07-29 03:31 pm (UTC)But but we need to split hairs again orthogonally and many times over. The anglosphere may already have both of these but both on the worst way, or in sub-optimal configurations etc.
Um, cheers!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 05:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 06:36 pm (UTC)I suppose one could call that the 'Byker Groove'...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-29 10:28 pm (UTC)I'm just thinking about the word "sustainable". It seems to imply that something is only worth doing if you can repeatedly do it more or less indefinitely - as if the objective should be to achieve permanent stasis. But isn't that boring?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-30 07:22 am (UTC)hey2
Date: 2008-07-31 04:05 pm (UTC)