Facadism ten years ago

On May 20th 2011, in other words a decade and three days ago, I photoed these photos, of a fine example of facadism in the process of being contrived. That is, an old facade is preserved, but an entirely new modern interior is inserted behind that facade:

I don’t know exactly when I started noticing this phenomenon, but these photos prove that I been doing this for over a decade.

Sadly, the resolution of these photos, photoed with my ancient last camera but about five (about six if you count the new mobile), a Canon S5 IS, is such that although there are street names to be seen in some of these photos, they are too blurry for me to read them clearly. So, I don’t know exactly where this was. The only other photos photoed that day provide no clues.

On the day, I would appear to have been at least as much interested in the crane.

What I mostly now note from the above photos is that in May 2011, the weather was the sort of weather that May weather should be. Our current May may get some nicer weather just before it ends, but that is still only a hope.

Views from and of the Blue Fin Building

GodDaughter2 has been doing a job in the Blue Fin Building, which is just behind Tate Modern. About three quarters of the way up this building there is a roof area you can walk about in and sit at tables in, and also an indoor sort of bring-your-own-food canteen with views out on outside this roof area. And yesterday, she arranged for us both to go up there are sample the views. Sadly, the weather was pretty filthy, and entirely lacking in the sort of bright sunshine illuminating everything that I so much prefer for photoing. But of course I photoed anyway:

What the above photos all have in common is that they combine views of London beyond the Blue Fin building with close-up views of this or that aspect of the building itself. Sometimes the Blue Fin foreground dominates, but often you just see a bit of the outside of the building, like the big transparent “wall” that stops you accidentally walking off this roof to your death, but which, because it is transparent, actually makes me (and GodDaughter2) scared to go near the damn thing, because transparent walls at the top of cliffs are not things that humans have all evolved not to be freaked out by. If you get my drift.

The best you can say about the weather was that it wasn’t raining all the time, just spitting some of it.

“587 tall buildings in the pipeline in London …”

This fake photo appears at the top of a piece about new building in London, this being how Nine Elms is about to look:

If you regularly travel by helicopter anyway.

Also adorning the same piece is this next view looking upstream at the same point in London, also including the now rather small looking box that seems to have sparked all this building excitement, the recently relocated US Embassy:

The style is incoherent modernism, i.e. the effect you get when you design your tower to be modernistic, and quite tall, and functional in shape rather than weird (which is rather too expensive to always be doing) but in no other way in harmony with the nearby designs. Many hate this non-style, but to me it seems all of a piece with London’s ruling ethos, to the effect that when in London I pursue my business and you pursue your business, and there is no boss of the two of us telling us to do our business is the same way, even though we are right next to each other.

I never trust these fake photos of buildings. This is one of those times when the fact that the internet never forgets can get a bit confusing, because the internet remembers all the various shapes each future building takes as it ducks and weaves its way from initial idea to planning permission to actually getting built. Rather than spending lots of time trying to guess exactly what will be built, I prefer simply to wait and see.

And as it happens I have been recently seeing some of these towers as they rise up, without me making any great effort like going to the river or even crossing the river and seeing it all close-up. My now regular journey back from the Royal Marsden typically sees me getting off the tube at Victoria and doing a bit of shopping, by walking south along Wilton Road to Sainsbury’s.

Looking back towards Victoria, I see Nova, with its weird-style red shape spiking upwards. This is the Carbuncle Cup style that I so relish, …:

… a style that is now being superseded in Nine Elms by a reversion to the more functional verticality of, for example, Docklands (although in Docklands there has been a tad more harmonisation of style between different towers).

Here is what I see when I look south from the same spot:

Which is a bit boring, but as I walk towards Sainsbury’s, things start to liven up, especially when the sky looks the way it did that particular day:

I only photo what is there to be seen. So, that bit of London at any rate continues to build, and continues to contain busy cranes.

And according to this report, that’s about to be the story all over London:

Love them or loathe them, it looks like despite a significant slowdown in building skyscrapers during the spring and summer in 2020, there was not the downturn feared because of the pandemic.

According to New London Architecture’s annual review of skyscrapers over 20 storeys or more, there are 587 tall buildings in the pipeline in London – with 310 granted full planning permission and 127 under consideration. A total of 35 tower blocks were finished last year.

That’s some pipeline. Although I wouldn’t call these new Things skyscrapers, exactly. The sky can sleep unscraped in its bed. More like Things of a Certain Size.

Nevertheless, I love all this. Not because the buildings will be much good to look at. They won’t be, although sometimes in combination they may add up to something quite dramatic. What I like is what they mean: lots and lots of people all living and working right next to each other, and gathering in restaurants and bars to schmooze with each other and to contrive new ventures and adventures, as befits a great city that is still growing as fast as ever it has.

Eat your pretty little heart out, Paris.

Crane and shadow outside Victoria Station

I love a good crane, especially in these almost craneless times. And I also love a good shadow. So, you can imagine how much I appreciated what I saw, outside Victoria Station, this afternoon:

Today there was rain around mid day, followed by the brightest of bright sunshine. This is the best sort of sunshine there is, because the rain washes the air before the sun shines through it.

Also present in this photo is Pavlova, the ballerina on top of the Victoria Palace Theatre. This is a very good photo, of the crane and its shadow, but not of Pavlova. For Pavlova, Try one of these.

Blue iceberg

Curiosità Scientifiche:

How come? Here’s how:

Blue icebergs form in 2 ways: either because they flipped upside down by emerging the submerged part out of the water, or because of extreme ice compression that takes place in hundreds of years.

Blue icebergs are often very old, and contain very little air, originally present in the ice. This composition varies the refractive index generating the amazing blue color.

Comments included: “Spettacolare!”, “Bellissimo”, “Fantastico!”, “La natura è meravigliosa” and “Stupendo”. Or as we Anglos say, and as an Anglo did say: “Wow”.

Photo by Robert B. Dunbar. All hail the Internet. Thank you Nick Gillespie.

No wonder artists don’t do beauty any more.

Vincent House with tree shadows – Vincent Square with cricketers

Today I forced myself out, to post a letter which had to be posted, something I don’t think I’ve done in years.

My guess as to where there was a posting box, or whatever they are called, took me to the nearest post office that I am aware of, via Vincent Square, which I hoped would be looking good in the sunshine. It was:

That building is Vincent House, which sounds and looks like it might be important, but it’s just a block of flats.

And this is the middle of Vincent Square:

In earlier times, on a day like this, I would have gone a-wandering and a-photoing, but now, I’m afraid I feel the cold, and although delightfully sunny it was still cold. Also, all walks now take twice as long. So I posted that letter, and also did some shopping and then went straight back home. Shopping being another thing that has had to change recently. Big and occasionally has had to be replaced by less but more frequently, because there are limits to how much stuff I can now carry in anything resembling comfort, especially up my stairs.

Just before I went on this expedition, I got a phone call from one of the Marsden exercise experts. Apparently exercise is good for you. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Life goes on.

Christ statue under construction in Brazil

What with my scaffolding fetish, I’m pretty sure I’m going to prefer photos like this one …:

… to the finished statue.

Photos of this monster Christ are now all over Twitter. BBC report here.

Tiger jacket with reflected bulding

What’s going on in this photo is that I was recently standing on a pavement in the South Kensington area, photoing a fake person who is wearing a real jacket with a tiger’s face on the back of it, but it’s a bit hard to make out the tiger’s face because some buildings across the road, very well lit by the bright sunshine that day are simultaneously being reflected by the window that separates me from the fake man and his tiger jacker:

I really like this photo. It resembles this earlier effort in being a puzzle caused by the reflection in a shop window colliding with what is behind the shop window and in the shop itself. But unlike that earlier photo, this one is a puzzle that is soluble, and one that I can fully explain.

As I have earlier said, I think that one of the features of architectural modernity is that there is now lots of shininess, and consequently lots of reflection going on. Modernity didn’t start out so shiny, because there was lots of concrete and brickwork to start with, and glass was a lot less marvellous then than it is now. But now, architectural modernity has got very shiny indeed. So, scenes like that shown in my photo above are not mere accidents. They capture something basic about the visual experience of living in a modern city. Such images are or a thing that we constantly see, and perhaps even a thing that you constantly notice. I don’t think it’s just me, in fact I know it isn’t.

In the bottom right hand corner of the photo above, part of a parked vehicle is to be observed. Modern vehicles being another characteristic source of modernistic shininess.

Day One of the county cricket season

… and the excitement at Bristol, where Gloucester are playing Surrey in Group 2 of the County Championship, has reached fever pitch:

Lockdown suits four day County Cricket rather well, because it supplies a readymade excuse for why nobody is at the ground watching it.

Gas works before lockdown ends?

I did quite a bit of writing today, but none of it for here, today. So, quota photo time, and again, it’s photoed in the well-lit dark with my Samsung Galaxy A40 mobile phone. I don’t know if gas work is what is happening, but that’s my bet, and if that’s right there is a lot of it about. I’m guessing they don’t like big rearrangements of the gas pipes when it’s freezing cold, as it was a week or two ago, but they want to get anything they want done done, before lockdown ends. And I further guess that this, at the junction of Warwick Way and Tachbrook Street was part of it:

I’ve been seeing gas work everywhere, like in Vauxhall Bridge Road. And are those smaller orange pipes also for gas. Guess: yes. (LAGER: No. See my comment.)

While wondering what verbiage to attach to the above photo, which I like simply for artistic effect and because of that sign about social distancing, I came upon this photo I photoed quite a bit earlier, at a spot I often shop at, where Horseferry Road does its big kink, where I often do very local shopping, and where I get my hair cut:

That’s definitely gas they’re working on there, because it says so. And it also goes on about social distancing, which at least fits with the social distancing sign in the first photo.

These annoying signs are becoming my most vivid recollection of lockdown, and it’s gone on for so damn long I can still photo more of them whenever I see them, as I surely will for quite a while.