200words: serpentine pavilion 2023

Wrangled by ideology, a putative convivial long table in a round house becomes a benighted round table for a longhouse. Here, a gloomthy lurker, your devouring mother will feed you now. Sitting at the centre of her knotty glulam web, Ghotmeh presides over a fully operational battle follie ~ weaponised soft play for infantile adults - scattered seating for a shadowy and introspective committee mulling the imposition of care. Inside, her crinkle cut brolly bundt cake bears claustrophobically low, bellying its spaceship hull with an abductive light beam from its oracular orifice. Thusly is vulvacore a womby antidote to phallic architectural hegemony.

The Serpentine’s blurb calls this “Archaeology of the Future” ~ a neat God-complex writing of our history laundering colonial nostalgia in subtractive architectonics of excavated skeletal forms. The nonagonic plan is formed in the negative space left as convex curves are cast between nine defensive spikes as the air is sucked out of the void between them. The enclosure is veiled in CNC lifestyle fretwork, a house of card ply doilies in cutesy Afrofuturism appropriated scandi with aboriginal flourishes ~ trypophobic colander-core: Etsy ethnic candle holder by night, and by day, a backdrop for Insta’s boho yolo fomos and their monstera deliciosas.

200words: outernet building

A poundshop iPhone case, glittered with the novelty charm of awkward teenage yearning long dulled by a century of exploitative supernormal stimuli. 

The Outernet building is a strained metaphor, bored of itself, knowingly: an ironic Fortnite skin of a building, merely the panelised garish avatar approximated for inconvenient embodiment, glibly adorned with languid Suicide Squad gothic drolery. 

An icon of empty iconography, gleaming cubicly as a Minecraft Kaaba for gyratory tiktokers lost in the urban showbiz facepalm that is neo Tottenham Court Road. 

The Now Building’s two squat forms huddle beneath Centre Point tower, anthracite fluting frames the black boxes as mawkish ebonised sarcophagi, hunched with bodyguard swagger flexing for the cult of RAL 7016 totalitarianism. 

Set in with gold, gilding the armsrace, upping the ante on Renzo’s neighbouring neon retinal assault. Gold in faddish space telescope chic. Gold grills and gold fins like everything is a heat sync now. 

The scalelessly BIM’ed, content-free elevations are the lorem ipsum of facade studies - wireframe webpage placeholders complete with pixel marked padding. 

Atop, a glass protuberance buds beyond the parapet. The dualised soul peeks from its prison frame, the sheathed pupa of luxury gnostic futurism emerges. We’re all meta now.

200words: fourth plinth

 

A whipped cream carnival floats beyond the parody of a teen movie in which Jeff Koons is shot by David LaChapelle as a bubblegum manga macro cherry popped pop art of post-innocence spaffed up the wall by seaside teats suckling pornified disaster capitalism’s disney-brained thirst trap. 

Modern life is a food fetish, here Heather Phillipson brings drone war to a pie fight: sploshing goop on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend for the retweets. Her Mills&Boon money shot is tawdry emoji urbanism tarting up Trafalgar with ladette girl boss nanny state flex vajazzling the fourth plinth with an anaemic turd glittered for the infantilised tourists below gawping for insta at the camp tousled kitsch turban of a grubby cholesterol cake circus. 

We live in a society of spectacle, distracting ourselves to death, where everything is synthetic and so everything-is-awesome all of the time. While the icecaps thaw, even our prophets’ protests are subsumed by a darwinian memetic race to the bottom of garish glib obscenity. 

2021’s commission is cautionary while being complicit - ambiguously platforming a paean to dribble-down economic bloatware, lionising the liquefaction of all that is solid, morbidly fascinated by our entropic Daliesque melting to grey goo, all the while watched over by machines of the surveillance state and memento mori.

https://web102.secure-secure.co.uk/theend.today/

https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/shorthand/fourth_plinth/

200words: Robert Harbison 1940-2021

“All art is perishable” - so opens the first line of that dogeared minor volume which, in 2008, a godfather pressed into the hands of a wayward godson. The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable was for me then a balm pitched perfectly at the resonant frequency of my convalescence from a built architecture that had become altogether saturated with too much sordid meaning. In I tumbled. Bob’s tone - of calm erudition and sanguine melancholy - lured a pilgrimage through Sebald and Keiller and other peripheral prophets beach combing remnant fragments in the cathedral ruins.

Ever an imposter I went up for my MA in 2011 after the party, in the Turnerian half light of higher education’s broader entropic subsummation by a bureaucratic managerialism. And I went up after Bob, a tugged Temeraire. I did not know him. Not really. Not much beyond his very present absence. But, occasionally we were visited by nostalgic happy reveries - his wiry shock-headed warmly transatlantic accordion chorded avuncular laughter creaking as a ship gesturally. 

He wrote to me exceptionally, once, wry and self-deprecating after one 200words, feeling he had "gone too far" in what he'd said about my "wild" "kaleidoscopic" V&A plywood piece ~ “why,” he asked, should he be the one to “apply the brakes” - a strangely precious email. 

Brigid Brophy had written of Deliberate Regression in 1980 that Bob’s prose had a “pile-up on the motorway manner of writing" - somewhere in that, perhaps precisely in that, touches his allure, and my affection for his earnest enquiry and the resonance I feel still now in my floundering for my own unbuildable redemptive meaning. In all intangible ways I owe some great debt to Bob for furnishing this fragment monger with the pleasure of a synecdochal praxis. 

[08.09.21]

200words: “..that all new architecture is always already out of date..”

Yes. 

Rather, we should kick back, crack a beer, with old timers @seeking_Trad, @wrathofgnon, @Western_Trad, @Arch_Revival_, @Trad_West_Art.  The future belongs to Twitter’s Architectural Dark Web - the ugly underbelly of culture-war clickbait and scammy fringe skirmishes vying for influencer status, purveying divisive nostalgia, political pearl-clutching, weird nearly-nazi manosphere memes, weaponised heritage assets unironically shit-posted to garner subs for their drop-shipping promotions.

Architecture has always been a Ponzi scheme, its journalism a mere handmaiden to privilege ~ why not go all in: monetise your outrage, flog a dog whistle, pimp your dead cat. We build after the end of history. There is no timeless way of building now.

Long story short. Capitalism hemmed us in. A vampire economy stranded new architecture on a temporal arête: algorithmically constrained to the past’s machine-learnt data sets, chronically indebted to a future already sold. New architecture was dead on arrival: conceived with a (Sebaldian) eye to its future existence as ruins. New architecture is an airless tyranny of vacuous amnesiac novelty charaded in the speculative conditional. New architecture is an ouroboric zombie apocalypse inside the hell of a simulacrum’s eternal regress. 

Palliative to new architecture: 200words! Convening a sordid self-righteous undertaker class of commentariat late modern miserablists.

 [24.11.20]

200words: Face masks

“Philosophy dies without air.. ..using up the air for telling without ever telling of air itself..” 

Luce Irigaray 

We were self-made men: anaerobic asteroids hurtling through an airless infinity, conquering space, vanquishing the void and being unflinchingly toward death. But now, air resurges, as a masked marauder.

A face mask gives closure to the inner topology of the human frame. Crudely, a face mask is a lid to the lungs, a seal of interiority, a capstone to the arch of my being - pointing both to the existence of air-to-be-contained and to the universal ubiquity of all things as-containers-of-air and likewise as containers of unseen potential.

Being-as-containing in a non-airless universe is not tautological, not semantic, and is non-trivial. This consciousness is a baptism-by and filling-with holy spirit, it is the beginning of realist magic and a re-enchanted cosmos. By breathing consciously we engage an ontology that wars against notions of persons as mere wireframes, point nodes, flat images or lumpen biology.

If face masks, then air. If air, then vessels. And, if vessels then we are tasked to be filled and fill others. Face masks make dependence visible.

[05.05.20] 

[Beyond 200 words here: https://sacredtexting.substack.com/p/-coronavirusbible-01-face-masks-the ]

200words: goldsmiths cca

Barn-mongering mischievists, neo-romantic rustiquists, crafty darlings of the scaff board lobby, Assemble, have built a gallery in up-and-coming New Cross. Their crumpled tweed jacket of the academe, complete with corduroy elbow patches and chalk dusting looks a smugly erudite, calmly ancient and sober bedfellow to the oily Blairite swagger of Allsop’s plastic grotesque Ben Pimlott building adjacent, leering down from it’s tousled toupée of steel spaghetti.

Inside the Goldsmith’s CCA, there is a hipster’s charmless charm to the ensemble, hammed up bare brick for Insta gratification, patchworked as a knowingly shanty makeshift in an embarrassment of greys. This textural fry is jarringly juxtaposed, as agnostic miserablism played in aesthetic gymnastics: one part archaeological affectation, one part hilarious Heath Robinson, one part ernestly sanitised White Cube, and the three interface awkwardly, in gobby mastic bodged junctions fudging the issue.

One man’s noble upcycling is another man’s gross nostalgia: they’re both here, clattering a cacophony of heavy-handed light touch interventions that are the creed of the cult of readymade irony. Assemble tarnish, burnish and brandish Duchampian ceramics at an urban scale; a montaged aggregation of found parts give a limpet lichen look to this British barnacle. It is a fusty fetishised fragment of a Frankenbuilding, a shattered shell hole shaded in the long shadow of Ruskin’s rugged Gothic, now revisited in zombieform.

200words: the weston tower

Jesus said relentlessly, “the Kingdom of God is like..” and so his church, with similaic vigour, makes metaphors manifest. Ptolemy Dean was appointed in 2012 to make "these stones … speak to all of the beauty of God's holiness". (ref)

Like how?

This Kingdom of God is a buried treasure, a concealed weapon, a tower-counted-the-cost-of, a new shrine in old design skins.

This Kingdom of God is a burnished black lantern staircase in the nook of a niche, an eight pronged arachnoid, a coal scuttled gun black friar in hooded holster, a stealth bomber quartered in a smuggler's cove, a dark horse stabled in an ungilt American Radiator cupola, a gratuitous crossbreed of Hawksmoor's proportions and Heath Robinson's brass spun spindrel mannerism buttressed by dark satanic milled lead chevron gills.

This Kingdom of God is Ruskinian. A modern Gothic synthesis of the natural and the grotesque. A lift shaft in the Butterfield and Street tradition bores theological up through slathers of geological strata, with the same affectation to cover the same crisis of faith but now with less actual polychromy than the Victorians. The warmly textured, divinely authored fossil record, which layers authorship into archaeology is a metaphor now obscured by façadism's barcode vogue.

–

(beyond 200 words)

This Kingdom of God is a spiral staircase, this spiral staircase, precisely in its inbetweening, imminently on-its-way not-yet, a betwixted cosmic interstice, the 108 steps to your best life now, in the now, not merely the winding route to @wabbey's cash in the attic, heavenly relics now postured spot-lit amongst the rafters of Quasimodo's loft apartment.

This Kingdom of God leads up to a private members' club. It's a £5 premium to be up in the gods, with less riff raff more ruffs in this inner sanctum. Glide the gloomy horseshoe, past the world's oldest stuffed parrot, to behold Heiman's monumentally melancholy portrait of a lone Liz the last queen of England.

200words: temperate house

A happy afternoon was spent in Decimus Barton’s display case reliquary for a horticultural cult, a grand taxonomy of remnant endangered species grown from cuttings.

~ Cut crisp in Panamas with florid accessories, the waspish Waitrose card carrying preening priestly class drawls reedy dry Henley vowels, vestigial of an invisible Raj. This crystal cathedral a refuge to the raffish cad’s saviour complex.

~ Banker dad bods dazed and blasé clique with like listless paternity leavers, pouting preppy with an all-terrain Bugaboo swagger, self-medicating the horror of fatherhood with a domesticated mother nature, tamed, contained and wipe-clean.

~ Bushy eager ‘lotment gardeners leaned ont spade stoic doffing floppy oilcloth capped over weather winked cagoules. Stooped and mellow fruitful, two pilgrim soil-scuffed spiral-bound sweethearts, joint attending in furtive reverent whisper, this is holy ground.

-

Richmond’s rusting ruin-ready skeletal Angkor Wat has been tamed, the gnarly triffids trimmed, the heavy hulking jungle pruned. The lazy gutsy grandeur of truss trellising and galloping rivets, are now squeaky and synthetically shades of white and magnolia. A sterile anaemic modernity draws charmless stainless service trunking through the ironwork and plaster festoonery, the data veins of a parasitic plant cabletied in place. This is the stage set for aestheticised STEM porn.

kew.org

200words: Bloomberg

Oo err, Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's bloatware is a prune purge, bland bling in a cartoon turd. Feathering his nest like a plumed bird, frilly milled gills on a schooned gird. Spooned curd in millennial pink: puce curves, in a Boolean merge of obtuse NURBs. Foster's teardrop loam legs astride a grater grid in a tuned third: astute work by a groomed nerd. Or a smooth perv, a colluder, dresses her in a reeded glass see-through skirt. Oo err, Bloomberg. Skin tone stone of a nude blurred in pixel mottled censor. And, Walbrook crotchless portals ooze venerial, unshorn, gruesome. Down in the crypt of this new church to the Cult of Mithras' lucre. The new turn is an aviatored super trouper, all seventies twinkly couture. Whilst bristling bronze portcullising keeps out the acute hurt of a cruel world.

Ooo err, Bloomberg.

web

200words: Sackler Courtyard at V&A

A white wash that wasn't, more a blue rinse mottled in sum, grimey on the whole, London's no clime for a pastel piazza darlin'. The jazzy pinstriped porcelain patchwork of semaphore nautical flags would shimmer in Nice, but here, Blightily bedrabbed, the effect is all dusty soil scuffed self-pity. This bathroom refurb on a urban scale is the more gauche for it's boorish cafe lurching insoberly into the square, a shapelessly jagged axial jaunt, which instagram forgives, but, closer-to the junction details despise their inconvenient materiality. The adolescent squiggle of a lightwell, lurks murky, basking sharky and euphemistic. Downstairs acrobatically accomplished manouvres swoop and bevel in a tight latex of treacle black-lacquered lustre, beneath a ceiling rendered in an embarrassment of angles, sheared and gorged with murmurs of disquiet and..

"'ello Sir, I'm Angela [anxious.], and this is my colleague Lee [oleaginous]. He noticed you hanging around inside earlier, would you like to tell us what you're doing. [flashes badge]" 
"A spluttering architect, honest gov. Loves a white tile me?" 

No, my cordial exchange with the zero-hours class of London's privatisation enforcement was entirely without wit and was received utterly without humour. With a wimper, I went, out through the inch-thick milled metal barricade.

web

200words: Plywood at V&A

Walking round the plywood exhibition asking, “Why is ply hip?” Wherein and wherefore the wiring of the zeitgeist that has bubbled forth this vogue for succulents in terrariums perched on coffee bars made with ply?

Made.com sponsor the show, wedded as they are to crystalising the myth of ply. The mythology of simpler times, elemental materials shaped by chipper chippies in the first industrial revolution, for dreamy surfboarders riding a wave of mid-century optimism. Things were good back then. Oh to be Post-war perennially, swinging home with the swagger of the sixities, all tongue and groovy with military derivatives into domestic contexts, a sailor home on leave. I'll make you a chair to remember me by, bent gymastically, a mandala warp, a mobius loop..

Ply, a synthetic and compound material, ever an allegory for modernity's pliable masses,  the chips and splinters of empire pressed into a mould.

Ply, a precarious material, ever an allegory for modernity's fragile self. Halfway between cardboard and CLT, ever a prototype for something else. It's fairface scratched by a careless mover, and in tearing the veneer, one shatters the whole.

Ply, a weaponised material, then, as now, the robots take over and nature is bent to concentrate wealth and slicken our future.

web

200words: Newport Street Gallery

High Priest Hirst's new temple positions his brand to cater culture to the emerging diplomatic quarter brokering nuclear power at Vauxhall.

Newport Street Gallery is a deft manoeuvre by the former formaldehyde-monger, schooled in YBA's practice of neo-liberal warehouse renaissance, flogging flesh and gilded bones to kleptocrats in a stylised performance art of self-aware gentrification. From without, the monied machinery is worn lightly, woven discretely into a rugged industrial street-scape. Within, however, turbo-charged religion is going on.

Caruso St John have choreographed a substance dualism, calculated to enshrine art thusly: the vast immateriality of infinite white gallery chasms interlinked by exquisite exercises in a very material obsession. The staircases are gorgeous. Gracious, balletic, asymptotic gestures manufactured with unspeakable precision. Wombs of nougat brick, every surface suggestive and seductive. The million-pound milled handrail, cast deep into the wall is a cavity that invites caress, a building yearning that you would run your fingers across the rim of the groove. Here, newly clothed emperors are nude descending a staircase, briefly and illicitly embodied, between the heady cerebral galleries.

Lastly, and lately added, the Pharmacy bar. If the gallery is the Father's transcendence and the stairs are the Son's immanence, here is the Holy Spirit cabinet. And Hirst, drunk on his own communion wine, vomits mixed metaphors on every surface. Bubblegum flavoured décor jostles with surgical memento mori. This clowning gory finale gives a sickly glib aftertaste to an otherwise sumptuous building.

newportstreetgallery.com
pharmacyrestaurant.com
carusostjohn.com/projects/newport-street-gallery

200words: cotton to gold at two temple place

Cotton, when it is grown by slaves, woven in satanic mills, to be sold to subjects of a vast military empire, becomes gold. It's hard to conceive a more efficient device for the concentration of wealth. And how would you spend it? And what strange lives are lived by those who hold the keys to printing money in this unprecedented way?

This show answers with works of alchemy from a golden age of mechanical reproduction. Bizarre obsessions, hoarded glitter, by delirious monied magpies, stashing precious trinkets that bespeak a fairytale, hearkening to an age of hand-making, pining for a lost land. Two Temple Place, an aptly maximalist frame for the exhibition, aches with excess, the beauty of this jewel box heaves a sigh of earnest intensity, aware of its own garish game of nostalgic distraction, but it does it so fabulously.

Collated and curated here is a distilled array: the dazzling ornamental intricacy of carved ivory, Tiffany pieces capturing an iridescent universe of hues, Millais sketches, Turner watercolours.. It is all exquisite. But at the same time, dead. Dead as the Peruvian huddled in ropes and rags, petrified as chloroformed beetles, static as taxidermy. This clutter of trophies is about power not art; the bequests beg to assuage a bottomless guilt.

twotempleplace.org/exhibitions/current/

200words: Westminster Cathedral

"Silver and gold have I none.." Acts3v6

I have long misunderstood the fabulous gloomth that stretches up into Westminster's vast Hogwartsian ceiling. There is no Gothic depth intended in this ancient charred expanse of cosmic night, no mystique of a hewn subterranean cavern, not even as a dark canvas backgrounding to the lower earthly lights. "If you come back in 300 years..." begins a guide effusively offering tidbits to the unsuspecting: it will all glitter, apparently. The tour continues with an emphasis on the gold invested thus far, assuaging none of my prejudicial conceptions of Catholic architecture. I wanted so very much for a route of conscience to shortcut this industrially sordid opulence, to access the material splendour on its own terms, but the guide was unrelenting: millions of pounds, if it is to be 24 carat.. I feel a bit ill, a sugar migraine brought on by saccharine polychrome excess, a dizzying Byzantine orgy of razzle dazzle, pomp and glory, shock and awe, a garish wedding-cake Harrods concession inside a Romanesque themed spa. And yet, it is a public building, sumptuously, generously civic in its nurturing craft: the mosaics are made, by makers, from Northampton. I confess I'm too quick to slight these efforts, forgive me.

westminstercathedral.org.uk

200words: richard serra at gagosian

Dead Load (2014)

A sliver of light between is the electric energy of this paired piece: plinthed and plinth, sledge to anvil, victor, victim - equal now they are stacked inert. “Dead” only for having once lived.The glow of molten metal breathed cool long ago, and the craze lines in the surface, the layered raging rust forest, the flecked mackerel streaked slate curling about mauve figures are a life after death.

Ramble (2014)

Irregularly multiply a brutal idea and what was accidental in one reinforces itself as a regime wrought upon a congregation of iron. This is the power of the mechanically produced many, Serra’s mute masses are here assembled as a holocaust of murdered metal, violently brought into being, the weather-tormented staining tears open the wounds of their making.

London Cross (2014)

Very very very there. I am totalised by a guillotine that pretends to go on forever, cropped only in my field of vision by the presumption of gallery walls. These vast metal planes would cross-brace the universe’s entire reality, and that infinite weight of being is brought to a stiletto point. London is invoked as such a node for irreconcilable, uncompromising singularities. 

Backdoor Pipeline (2010)

Such an even oxidation gives this leviathan hull to glow, and the writhed muscular architectonic manoeuvres of enclosure, disclosure and the womby void want to be Freudian. But it is again the weight, combined with the impossible double curvature, which command attention and awe at the pure sublime bombast of engineered extremism.

gagosian.com

200words: children of silicon valley

“the scoffer is an abomination to mankind” (Pr24v9)

Silicon Valley, as Babylon, is located metonymyically more than geographically. It conjures the concentrated efforts of digital city-building: a catalyst of world-creation, an accelerator for the hopes, dreams and foibles of the contemporary human condition. A future is forged in this kiln, transactions here are prophetic, entrepreneurs here are prophets, false prophets insinuates Harrison via Jesus.

What is Jesus doing name-dropped at the culmination of this sneeringly snarky, uncharitably pessimistic, fear-mongering Luddite article beset by ad hominem fallacies, broad brushes, slippery slopes, strawmen and old-fashioned cynicism? This is not the Jesus who enjoyed clubbing with the Sean Parkers of a different time (Mt9v11). Nor the Jesus who advocated extremely shrewd management of coffer enlargement (Lk6v9). Nor the Jesus who had no qualms with working for so harsh a taskmaster as Google (Mt5v27). This is a Guardian reader's own personal Jesus, presuming that Jesus would take the side of the Heideggarians. Would he? There is worlding and there is overcoming the world – a tension which meets in the incarnation – and such a meeting does change a world which needs changing.

Harrison's article is astute, while it is also indulgent. Technology, as journalism, has the power to simulate, stimulate and self-replicate. What then, Phil, is the fruit of your work?

nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/17/children-silicon-valley/

200words: serpentine pavilion 2014

"And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split." Mt27v51

A Turin Shroud draped about a torus, riddle me that, we are amongst a many metaphored folly this year. Radić’s aged ageless hessian frays, it is all ever-so textured, layered glazed over knowingly, and labouriously authentic.

The meme of ‘made’ things makes a fetish of the crude and unfinished, and here our druid leads us in a frenzied fervour for the tactile. The elemental thrownness of the rocks demands them to be touched. They are very there, gesturally scattered detritus from the explosive force of metamorphosis, left remnant as the butterfly flew forth.

A similar glorious savage mind’s naïveté pervades the forted playpen within, as the sun warmed papier-mâché paints the interior a Soanian ochre. I regress to clammy canvas camping on my grandparent’s lawn, I am fairytaled, I am Where the Wild Things Are.

It is a heavily engineered hovering however, stalk metal legs gangle as gang planks akimbo ushering the good and the gullible to another faux excavation. The same charming ruse utilising an accentuated narrative of accretion and subtraction from a whole is one that sustained Fujimoto’s and Herzog&deMeuron’s forms previously. The ossified process of production is key to the currency of the contemporary folly - the hint of a happening, a glimpse into that moment at which architecture ruptured contiguity.


serpentinegalleries.org

200words: Louis Kahn - The Power of Architecture

"Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel."
Ezekiel 13v4

There is a recognisable formula to the eulogising typology of fan-exhibit: a fawningly dreary hodge-podge of uncritically splayed miscellany, soundbites, remnants left by  a man who could do no wrong. The whole dimly lit ensemble reads like a skim through the colour plates illustrating an inconclusive essay yet to be written, I am titillated and briefly diverted, and I leave hungry, none-the-wiser.

This exhibition concerns itself with 'the Power of Architecture', as if it were a brute force, as if that were a good thing. This exhibition concerns itself with the phenomenon of an individual, without a sensitivity to any meaningful context for these isolated details of Kahn's life and work now cluttered into a reliquary. It is in this very contextlessness that the motive force for such an exhibition is betrayed: to reinforce all myths of genius, to validate the narrative of creation ex mystique.

Against this, however, there is footage on one screen, perhaps by Nathanial Kahn, which dwells at first on the inhabitation of the National Assembly Building, in its shade weathered elders share a cup of tea, glinting dazzling faces blur past in their unmonumental everyday urgencies. Then the building is left behind altogether and we dwell on the rich human landscape of so much that is not-architecture, so much that is rusty and perpetual, fervent and alive. This vast portrait of the Dhaka into which Kahn's geometry is pressed suggests the subtle tensions and reciprocities which give to the form a richer endurance.


Design Museum

200words: kings cross development

“Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.” Matthew15v27

My experience of Kings Cross was marked by two unexpected encounters, aptly two necessarily and inextricably constitutive of the development's totality. The first, a gate ajar to the Skip Garden. 'Are you open?'; 'No, but help yourself to a look around.' said she washing some tin plates under a plastic roof. And all around me at once, verdent emergence, a mellow, fruitful bricolage. 'Thankyou.' A wander further and security detail betray a happening of quite another kind. 'Have you registered?' 'No..' 'Would you like a canape?' Google's eyewear is being launched, a protoyped product, one of a billion identical devices primed to usher an age of augmented urbanity. 'Ok Glass' These two encounters could be comically or tragically contrasted, but more interesting, I think, is to consider the enterprise which absorbs these both and stands to profit by urbanism done well. This city quarter is taking shape inorganically, with stupendous capital ventured on its success - the chickens of such speculative development must be counted before they are hatched. All this simulated and subsidised cultural incubation, therefore, seeks pre-emptively to engender that intangible quality of place, that energetic buzz to a something willing itself to emerge: the city as a happening. Would that all urban spaces were so motivated, even cynically, to be present tense continuous and ecstatic.

- - -

A little about the architecture: If, conceptually and ethically, we permit this vast and profiteering form of development there is little to fault in its realisation, Kings Cross does all the details of aggressively slick urbanism with superlative panache. Chipperfield's elemental and bullish One Pancras Square revives the pleasure of monumental cast iron in architecture with warmth and intricacy. Allies&Morrison's Two Pancras Square shimmers: the gradiated window reveals subtly give the appearance that the glassy soul of the building soars while it yet withdraws into a mysterious interior as it ascends. This variation, somewhat akin to entasis renders an elevation sublime, and combined with the gilded highlights, the architects achieve exactly the distraction desired. Distraction from the volumetrics at work, unit to plot, net to gross, floor to ceiling squeezed, heaved and disguised in the ruthlessly rectilinear gridded graph paper of New London vernacular.

kingscross.co.uk
gridironkingscross.co.uk
twopancrassquare.com
hargreavesfoundry.co.uk/foundry/architectural_cast_iron/architectural_case_studies/casestudyview/24
globalgeneration.org.uk/kings-cross-skip-garden