Architecture – Page 25 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Cycling out of Lockdown

Last Sunday, the gloriously sunny day when I photoed this reflection photo, I also photoed many other photos, as I walked to and around Parliament Square, and then along the River to Lambeth Bridge and across, and then to Vauxhall. My aim was to photo the statues in Parliament Square and the two pronged Vauxhall Bus Thing in friendlier light than I had so far managed.

But while engaged in this project, I couldn’t avoid noticing something else that was happening. See if you can spot what these twenty eight photos have in common:

Yes. Well spotted. Cyclists. Lots and lots of cyclists. Cyclists on their own. Cyclists in pairs. Families of cyclists. Great squadrons of cyclists. On otherwise almost entirely empty roads.

Quite what this “means”, I’m not entirely sure. But a major point of this blog is to feature things that seem interesting, without it being entirely clear to me why they are interesting. “Interesting” being the lowest form of interestingness that there is, because it’s the sort that you haven’t yet explained to yourself.

The only titbit of interpretation I can offer is that I caught a Daily Telegraph article about how the Lockdown was beginning to fray at the edges, and illustrated at the top with a photo like one of the ones above, featuring a great cluster of cyclists. I can’t now find this piece, but I swear I saw it. I didn’t read it, because the DT hides most of its stuff behind a paywall these days, and paying my way past paywalls is a habit I don’t want to start catching. But, I did see it. It was something along these lines, but with a cyclists photo at the top instead of a short video about people sunbathing en masses on the beach.

Also, there was me, creeping about photoing these cyclists. I too am fraying the Lockdown at its edges.

Because, another interesting thing about Lockdown London, at any rate the bit I live in, is that the Plod are almost nowhere to be seen. Parliament Square on Sunday contained many cyclists and creepers about like me, but no coppers whatsoever. You’d think Parliament Square would still be a worry to them, yet the only cops I saw that day were charging about in vans, attending to some other matter of far greater importance to them than me creeping about photoing, or than lots of cyclists. Who knows? Maybe they were actually having a go at some crimes.

Now, I know, had any policemen tried interrogating any of these cyclists, their answer would have been: “This is excercise, and exercise is allowed.” That would have been my answer also. But in practise, the rule that the police seem to have been applying during all this History has been more like: “You can go out, but you are not allowed to enjoy it.” It was the way these cyclists were so obviously having a good time taking their exercise that made it feel like defiance of the official line. And my worry was pleasure (because photoing) is what I would have been accused of also. So, I agree with the implication of that DT piece. It’s starting to crumble. If the government is wise, it will now relax things.

At the risk of boring you, another thought occurs to me about these cyclists, which is that slowly but surely the Lockdown is being politicised. Lefties don’t mind the economy tanking quite so much, because they have a government that they hate that they can then blame it all on. They have elections to win that they’ve lately been losing, rather badly. Righties, on the other hand, want the Lockdown to end, so that they can get back to being right about everything.

But cyclists of the sort I was photoing are a classic lefty demographic. If they are making a nonsense of the Lockdown, then the Lockdown is in trouble and needs to be wound down rather fast.

Also, the very fact that Lockdown is being politicised is further evidence that people are no longer taking it that seriously, the Righties in particular. When you start thinking how the crisis du jour will help or hinder your political tribe, then it’s no longer a proper crisis. It’s a mere circumstance.

Please don’t mistake the above for my considered opinions. This is me having made some observations, and then me thinking aloud about those observations.

Colourful Modernism

Google sends me emails about “new london architecture”. As you can imagine, there’s not a lot of news of this sort just now. But today, I received a link to a report about this, or maybe that’s these:

I smelled a young designer trying to get noticed, and I was not wrong. The thing is, the email said something about “colourful city benches”, and that intrigued me in all sorts of ways. I like public sculpture, especially if you can sit on it. I am interested in how designers are doing a lot of colour these days. And before the link even materialised, I placed a mental bet along the lines described in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Sure enough, Irene Astrain is indeed young. Well, thirties, which is young by architect standards. She only got started with her own enterprise in 2016.

(Starchitects often have to be seventy before they get to be starchitects. (Which was why Zaha Hadid’s recent death in her mere sixties was such a shock. (She should have had another thirty years of shape shifting ahead of her.)))

But back to these benches. What they say to me is that here’s a young architect, doing the old attract-maximum-attention-with-whatever-piddling-little-job-they’ll-let-me-do trick, and making two very strong statements. One: Modernism ain’t going anywhere. Two: but it is going to get much more colourful.

Time was when black and white, and what you get when you mix black and white (grey), were the most modern colours there were (I strongly recommend that link), and photography could also only do black-and-white. And for that mid-twentieth century generation of architects, colour was vulgar and trashy, even Victorian, the Victorian era having been, architecturally speaking, a very colourful and garish time. So, for the Modernists, coloured architecture was the superimposition of mere surface effect. Colour did not ooze out of the inner essence of whatever it was, the way Modernist shapes did, or were claimed to. So, black-and-white architecture was de rigueur and colour was an abomination.

(Interestingly, Le Corbusier deviated from this norm. More recently, Renzo Piano is now very old, but has still done some very colourful buildings, right here in London.)

And now, black-and-white-only is itself what a bygone era looked like. Colour is now done a lot better, in cities that are getting a lot less polluted than they used to be. Colour photography is something everyone can now do and now wants to do.

There’s more blog postings to be done about why Modernism ain’t going anywhere, and it damn well ain’t whatever you maybe might wish. But those will have to wait. Meanwhile, I promise nothing.

There are also lots of blog postings to be done, or discovered having been done by others, about how modernism is caused by, among other things, the fondness that adults have for the kind of things they played with when very young, and when very small compared to these things.

Hong Kong Demo – London – January 19th 2020

The Chinese government has been taking advantage lately of the fact that there is now only one media story, and is now crunching down on Hong Kong. Because now, this isn’t much of a story, compared to the big story.

As soon as the current round of dramas in Hong Kong began, I was pessimistic about the outcome in the short run, and I am even more pessimistic now. The only hope for the HongKongers, I think, is to get back at their tormentors by turning China itself, in the fullness of time, into something far different and far better, which won’t be so CCP friendly. And in the meantime torment their tormentors by making them scared, and angry that they are liable not to be written up very kindly by History. In short, the HongKongers must now settle down to try to win in the long run, along with everyone else in the world who would like China to be less horribly governed and generally a better place and less of a plague, so to speak, on the world.

But, to do my little bit for keeping Hong Kong as a story now, here are some photos I took of a pro Hong Kong demo in London on January 19th of this year, but never got around to showing anywhere, until now. These next few photos concentrate on the messages the demo-ers were proclaiming:

One weird thing though, the demo seemed to be outside this place:

What have the HongKongers got against the Royal Institute of British Architects?

This slice of google mappery explains:

The RIBA is across the road from the Chinese Embassy, and the demonstrators were shoved across the road. I have various guesses as to who made this happen and why, but I basically do not know.

Reflection

Not the sort you do inside your brain; the sort you can see:

My photo walks tend to happen in the afternoon and early evening, after I have done morningy things at home. But today I took a quite long walk, quite early in the morning by my getting old standards, in order for the light to be coming from a different direction and thus to photo certain Things better. And of course everything looked a bit different, including the River, because light was bouncing into it and off of it in unfamiliar ways from Things that didn’t usually look like that. It helped that there was hardly a cloud to be seen anywhere in the sky.

When I first got a digital camera I couldn’t photo The Wheel enough. What a great Thing. But soon I realised that just photoing the Thing itself wasn’t good enough. You had to play photo-games with it in some way. Line it up with other Things, seen through it. Or reflect it, in a window for instance. Or water.

I like how the foreground foliage blots out any direct view of the Thing itself.

The above photo was just one of my favourites so far from today’s expedition. There were other nice photos also, but the above will suffice for now.

Anyone know what those two little golden crosses are, in the River? Image googling for “golden cross”, got me nowhere helpful.

Private jet with tent

Indeed:

Photoed by Michael Jennings at Madras Municipal Airport, and posted on Facebook on August 21st 2017.

Said Michael, next to the photo:

All accommodation in this town has been sold out for three years. It doesn’t matter if you arrive in your own jet – you are still sleeping in a tent.

What Michael didn’t say was what the circumstances of this accommodation shortage were. Was something in particular happening at that particular time, or is accommodation in Madras always something you have to book three years in advance? Michael?

Ever since I got it clear in my head that Michael allows all photos he posts on Facebook to be re-posted here, provided there is a little globe logo above them (which means that the whole world is welcome to read and share what he has put), and provided I give him the credit for having photoed them, I have been trawling through the photos he has posted. The above photo is now one of my favourites of his that I have encountered so far.

This link works for me, because I am “on” Facebook (although I have yet to put anything there myself). Does it work for you? Do you have to be a Facebooker for it to work? Or will that link get you to Michael’s Facebook posting anyway? Questions questions.

I like that Michael’s shadow is present, bottom left.

“Architecture” is in the category list for this not so much because of the very forgettable airport building, but because of the tent. Are tents architecture? I think so, and a highly significant form of architecture. A form of architecture that has transformed the nature of “homelessness” by providing homeless people with … homes! When I was a kid, we had to “pitch” a tend by banging wooded pegs into the ground, which consequently had to be soft. Try doing that at an airport. Or on a city pavement. These new tents that you merely have keep weighted down have changed the world.

Whenever I encounter such tents on the streets of London I have been photoing them, ever since the above thoughts first crossed my mind. Real Soon Now (although I promise nothing) I should dig up all my tent photos and do a posting about this.

Vauxhall Bus Station is (maybe) about to get demolished

When they were building it:

Now:

Both photos photoed by me, on April 17th 2004 while they were building this Thing, and earlier this evening.

It’s Vauxhall Bus Station, which is just a walk from my place across the River, and which they are now about to demolish. Well, I say that, but what with all the History we’ve been having lately, all bets like this are probably now off. What they had in mind, before the History, was to knock down the Bus Station, and then have Zaha Hadid Architects supervise the erection of two new towers where the Bus Station was. Towers with a new Bus Station at the bottom of them.

Memo to self: Go back to this spot earlier in the day when the light just might illuminate this place, rather than plunge most of it into darkness. But in my defence, no matter how dark it is, you can still see the two … sticking up things.

I have been believing that the big new tower already there was also the work of Zaha Hadid Architects, but I think I got this notion from perusing an earlier plan which included the two new towers they only now intend to build. Actually this new tower is the work of KPF. This tower looks just like a regular tower, except that it looks even more like a pile of big boxes piled up, nearly in line but not quite. That way, you can tell it’s architecture, rather than just a building. Actually I quite like it. As towers of this sort go, this is quite good.

As for the Bus Station, well, I think I’m going to prefer the new towers, if they ever happen. The trouble with those two thingies sticking upwards for no very obvious reason is that they look like they might be providing shelter, but they don’t. Okay, they are something of a local landmark. You know where you are when you see them. But, they’re right next to the MI6 Building, which is even more of a landmark. The ZHA towers look like they’ll be much classier.

I plan on keeping an eye and my camera on developments at this spot, if there are any.

Reflections in blue sunglasses

According to my hard disc, I photoed this photo on October 6th 2004. I fefinitely photoed it with my ancient Canon A70:

Not bad. Clearly visible on the right spectacle lens, as we look, and especially so if you click and make it bigger, is a current architectural obsession of mine, Battersea Power Station.

The guy wearing the glasses was a fellow pupil in a digital photography course, run by my Local Authority, which I participated in. To very little effect on me, I’m afraid. I was then and remain a self-taught pointer-and-clicker, on Automatic. Most of what I have learned is how well pointing-and-clicking on Automatic actually works. Aside from a few wisdoms about light and how to get it on your side, most of what I have learned has concerned what it makes most sense for me to be photoing. As I have noticed more things that I find worth photoing, my photos have got slowly better.

On the left, me. I don’t like regular selfies, with nothing but me. But I do enjoy Alfred Hitchcock type selfies, where I can be glimpsed in photos that are mostly about something else, or at the very least about more than just me.

Happy Easter

As in: I hope you’ve been having one. Because it is now quite late on Easter Sunday.

Although a devout atheist, I’ll celebrate with three big London places of Christian worship, all photoed in June 2016, from the top of one of them.

Here are the other two, an Abbey and a Cathedral:

On the left, Westminster Abbey, with Big Ben right behind one of its towers. On the right, St Paul’s. With a green crane right in front of it.

And here are a couple of photos of the building I was photoing from, the other Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, a walk up Victoria Street from the Abbey:

On the left, looking down on Westminster Cathedral, again from the top of its tower; on the right, the shadow of the Cathedral’s tower, on some of the Big Lumps of Victoria Street.

Look very carefully at the photo on the right, and you can also see the other Cathedral, in the middle and far off, and the Abbey, off to the far right and far off.

Finally, two rather off-topic photos (not quite the phrase I’m looking for but it’ll have to do), photoed from and inside the same spot:

On the left, well, it’s been called a cathedral. Of power. Battersea Power Station, now being surrounded by apartments, them being the object of my last two expeditions.

And on the right, I’m just inside the tower of the Cathedral, with the openings to one of the outside balconies shaping the light as it crashes through onto where the lift is. That one had me saying “wow” when I was clicking through the old directory, and I hope you agree that that’s a good sign.

Like I say: Happy Easter.