Some agreement, but still needs a caution from the ponceyness police
Article with much of which I am in substantial agreement about the massive hubris of architects and their lack of feeling for the lived environment.
Though, for the record, and in the light of the recent Hardy post, I feel some people might dissent from the suggestion that
Thomas Hardy, to judge from Max Gate, the house he designed for himself in Dorchester, made the right choice when he elected to abandon architecture in favour of writing.
Also feel his scorn for the planned and designed community has skipped right over the delight that is Hampstead Garden Suburb.
However, while I'm not yet calling for a ponceyness ASBO for Mr Meades, I do think the ponceyness police ought to knock on his door and caution him for this:
A writer, at least this writer - and I am hardly alone - sees entropic beauty, roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of ad hoc second world war fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire, flaking private/keep-out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, burnt-out cars, burnt-out houses, abandoned chemical drums, abandoned cooking oil drums, abandoned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with may bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, buddleia, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellated with CCTV cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the Germolene-pink premises of a salmon smoker, bricked-up windows, travellers' caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments.
That's what I see: layers of urban archaeology. It's what painters such as Carel Weight and Edward Burra would have seen, what George Shaw and Julian Perry still see. A site of richness and multiple textures which feeds curiosity. It is obviously decaying. But decay, as anyone who has watched meat rot knows, possesses a vitality of its own. Such vitality is infinitely preferable to sterility and stadia.
Peasants in slums are just so picturesque, let us go to Naples and paint watercolours of them...
I am all for a certain sweet disorder and unplanned development, but I do think that kind of vitality has to be distinguished from urban grot that the people who live there would rather do without.
I.e. it's back to environments that are liveable rather than primarily arousing aesthetic emotions, of whatever kind.
This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1736485.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.