Architecture Needs Urban Exploration

One day, when I was about 4 years old and living with my grandmother, I discovered the basement.  Steep, narrow, stairs wound down into a vast, black space.  Negotiating each stair required increasing bravery, the dark, much more.  Past an antique roll top desk and a disused coal bin that could have been a dungeon, a small shaft of dusty light fell from one of the few windows.  Just visible beyond was a braced trunk which, to my four year old eyes, looked exactly like a pirate’s treasure chest.  It even had a large and ornate padlock which came open with a gentle pull.  Within was a priceless treasure:  my uncle’s Army Air Force officer’s uniform from World War II replete with insignia.  I wore the Eisenhower jacket  with the sleeves rolled up and the service cap stuffed with newspaper for the remainder of the summer.

I mention it because it suggests something fundamental about being human.  I would go much further than T. S. Eliot: we are all explorers, from the beginning to the end.  In Autumn of last year I came across and read Bradley Garret’s “Explore Everything:  Place-Hacking the City.”  Garret’s chronicle of his and the London Consolidation Crew’s transgressive urban exploration of sites as dramatic and varied as the London Shard while under construction to all the disused London Tube stations to the Edinburgh Forth Railway Bridge can be read as a great adventure memoir, a sub-culture anthropological study, even as a kind of sub-culture tragedy suffused with a melancholy born of the futility of a brave group of misfits pursuing dangerous physical exploration to overcome social exclusion.  The photographs are phenomenal.

I was walking across Blackfriars Bridge and despairing of London’s skyline evolution one morning a few weeks ago when it occurred to me that the problem is that architects are being directed or are even choosing to design to the wrong values.  Height and presence alone, are finally static and boring.  Even complex curvilinear shapes, the creation of which I spent 20 years contributing to the mathematics thereof, are no better.  For some reason I’m reminded of Patton’s statement about the obsolescence of fixed-fortifications.  That’s part of the reason that Garrett’s exploration of the unfinished Shard is compelling whilst a visit to its observation levels now is more than anti-climactic.  In contrast, consider the walk to the top of St. Paul’s dome or even a lazy ride on the Eye.

Especially in a city with the history of London, but any place really, architects need to design buildings that make people want to explore them.  Structure and shape must dynamically reveal both mystery and meaning.  I doubt Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren and the other great architects of the 17^th and 18^th century had that in mind.  Certainly James of St. George was thinking of other things when he designed the superlative Welsh Edwardian castles.  But that is their effect.  We love visiting those castles, particularly on a day with changeable weather when there are few or no other visitors because they make us into explorers.  St. Paul’s, indeed all the great English cathedrals do that in part because of the tension between their dual role of historical commemoration and religious celebration.  Tension, geometric or cultural is essential.  We are dramatic creatures.  Fencing tonight.

Site Lines: Modern London and Medieval Bologna

Lately, whenever I look at the London skyline from anywhere an odd artifact from Palazzo d'Accursio off Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore comes to mind.  It was the kind of thing that was easy to forgo in favor of the early Renaissance art and more dramatic historical artifacts.  But it communicated something that could only be appreciated geometrically or visually.  It was a model of medieval Bologna, sometime around 1200-1300.  At that time, Bologna had around 180 independent towers.

They were built by bankers, guilds and the super-rich families of the age probably as one of the few practical means of protecting wealth which necessarily had a cumbersome, physical form.  The towers were square and utilitarian.  The few windows were arrow slits.  Indeed, in the ceiling of one of the colonnades that make the city such a pleasure to walk at any time of year, you can still see a crossbow bolt where it was shot into the ceiling.  It must have been interesting to do business then.

The city’s architecture was so crowded and complicated and interesting, I’m surprised it didn’t show up as a location for one of the versions of Assassin’s Creed.  Traversing the vertical labyrinth by leaping from tower to tower could have just the right blend of intellectual challenge and adrenalin for an exceptional computer game.

Needless to say, the site lines would have been terrible and it was an expensive and brute force solution to a problem tractable to more efficient and elegant social and political alternatives.  As the towers in London continue to rise, I fear for the extraordinary visual beauty of the city.

Few of Bologna’s towers survive.

Yet, I have to admit I have a passion for monumental, fortress architecture.  Here are two morning hike photos:  one of the town of Peille, France and one from the Four Corners in the southwest US.  It’s interesting to consider what common exigencies, caused them to make some similar choices and what role, if any, aesthetics played.

Nevertheless, medieval Bologna must have been beautiful from a distance on the right kind of day.

 

Trying to Conceptualize London

One of the cheeriest, thorny problems I’m fortunate to have to consider frequently is how to think about London.  It remains, without doubt, after innumerable visits, my favorite city.  I’m a virtual Londoner.  These days there are 8.3 million true Londoners; only the “Great Book of the Internet,” as a very perspicacious 16^th century female re-enactor in Stirling Castle calls it, might be able to count the number of virtual Londoners.

Yet, in spite of all the new gem-cut glass and steel or just plain weird and whimsical skyscrapers, it remains also a small town in the very best sense.  When I think of the time we’ve just spent there that theme comes to mind.

We got up much too early a week ago last Saturday, drove from Cooper Knowe’s House at the edge of the western Isles of Scotland, where we’d been staying, avoided several red deer on the edge of the road in the darkness, through a magnificent sunrise before Loch Lomond, got a tad lost in Glasgow, and took a very reasonable Virgin train to London Euston and a fine London cab to our flat on Stamford Street in Southwark (Received Pronunciation:  “sʌðək” or “sʌvək”; an issue best left for closing time of the Spade and Becket pub in Cambridge.)  That evening we walked the few blocks to the Tate Modern where we ate at the Restaurant on the sixth floor at a table next to the window looking over the Thames and across the River to Paul’s.  A note about the Restaurant at the Tate.  It violates a major rule of world cuisine which is that inevitably the quality of the food is inversely proportional to the quality of the view.  The Restaurant at the Tate has always been good in my experience and that Saturday evening, after a long travel day, it was excellent.

Sunday morning, after toast, coffee, with Internet news and a more substantial munch of a cheddar and pickle sandwich at the Pret two doors down we were off to the intimate British Museum.  Some days it seems like 4.15 million of the true Londoners plus again as many tourists are there.  Sunday was no exception.  Yet, as soon as I engage with something, usually an old friend like an artifact from Sutton Hoo, all the other visitors recede into a vague, Whovian alternate dimension.  And I always discover something new.  This time there were several including a bronze head of the Assyrian King of the Wind Demons “Pazuzu” (remember the scariest moment in "The Exorcist:” when Max Von Sydow as a priest/archaeologist stares down the stone effigy of the demon in a dusty Iraq archaelogical site with a snarling dog between?), a truly spooky exhibition of illustrations of witches throughout time and last, but not least, a classic Greek vase with the best illustration of Theseus and the Minotaur I’ve ever seen.

It was difficult to believe the dry, pleasant almost summery weather after Scotland.  And evening brought a much anticipated first visit to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.  The new theatre, a recreation of Inigo Jones’ Blackfriar’s Theatre used by Shakespeare, seats 340 and is lit only by candlelight.  We had the great pleasure of hearing a concert of Indian music celebrating Rabindranath Tagore by Soumik Datta, Souvid Datta, Rosabella Gregory, Fiona Bevan and Anoushka Shankar.  I don’t know Indian music so I had to listen very carefully and work hard which was wonderful to do in such a small, comfortable space.  I’ve been trying to come up with an accurate meaningful superlative and can’t.  I’ll have to make due with a simile instead.  Imagine hearing jazz for the first time from Dave Brubeck live in a perfect, small space with extraordinary acoustics.  It was something like that. 

Monday we decamped for a day trip by fast train to Canterbury.  I know it’s not London; but with the fast train, it’s virtually London, and, walking through the town to the Cathedral I sensed that the town is struggling a little with identity and economy for that reason.  The top of my list was a kind of personal pilgrimage to the tomb of the Black Prince which felt necessary and appropriate since I’d recently published my novel, As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields.  The cathedral was unusually empty.  Still, I managed to hear several interesting revisions of the Black Prince’s history from tour guides.  One of the most interesting was that the Black Prince was buried in Canterbury Cathedral because his wife, Joan the Fair Maid of Kent, was buried in the crypt below the cathedral.  Romantic but wrong:  she outlived him and is buried in Lincolnshire next to her first husband.  I also spoke to a charming woman member of staff who conveyed the usual ambivalence about his tomb’s presence in the cathedral particularly because of the sack of Limoges and a general discomfort with Canterbury’s dual role as both a place of worship and a national monument.  By the way, the Black Prince’s history at Limoges may not be nearly as dark as Froissart impugned based on a new letter of the Prince’s that was recently found http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28161434.  On the way out we stopped to share a quick beer at the Bishop’s Finger Pub (also according to their sign the oldest brewer in England) which Robert pronounced as excellent.

Back in London in the early evening we saw “Dr. Scroggy’s War,” Howard Benton’s new play, at the Globe which dramatizes the exploits of Dr. Harold Gillies, the physician who pioneered plastic surgery for treatment of the horrific facial wounds during World War I.  It’s a comedy.  No really.  Well, to be accurate “historical-comical,” to use Polonius's phrase.  It’s a good play, Benton wrote it for the Globe and makes effective use of Shakespearean techniques.  It explores the issues of human identity and purpose with a kind of quiet rhetorical structure whilst remaining perfectly accessible.  Afterwards, we went next door to the Swan for an after play drink amidst some of the actors whom Lynn had the audacity and good sense to congratulate on their performances.  I know it’s shallow to say so but, wow, they’re a good looking group.

Our last full day we spent at Churchill’s War Rooms and at an exhibit of late Turner the Tate Britain.  And that brings me back to where I started about scale.  “…in that small time” Shakespeare writes of Henry V.  The same could be said of the underground warren from which Churchill and his staff led the last defense of Europe until the US entered World War II.  The place is full of the music of history, to use John Meacham’s brilliant phrase in his description of Churchill.  Then there was the Turner exhibit of late works.  It is so large, reflects such great creativity that I couldn’t wrap my mind around it even with a full afternoon.  It would require weeks.  They should warn you.  And we couldn't leave the Tate Britain without looking at the Pre-Raphaelites as always.

We finished with dinner at Tamarind in Mayfair, which is still spectacular and innovative after 20 years.

Back at the flat, Robert played the traveling guitar he’d purchased in Perth and which he’d been playing evenings and mornings the entire trip.  He played some compositions of his own as well as some Baroque pieces he’s been working on.  It’s so easy to grow accustomed to live music.  And my cousin is getting to be really good.