Streets in the Sky

Le Corbusier must have realised, when he drew the section of the Maison Clarte in Geneva (top), that it sucked. He must have realised that the higher you build an apartment block the principle of light wells as staircases, of holes in stuff, stopped working. Even a casual look at a section through the Maison Clarte proves this; you don't even have to be an expert. The traditional European City and it's city blocks regulated to six stories and based, in plan, around holes in stuff, would have to go.
That is not to say that the plans of the Maison Clarte are not interesting, quite the opposite, they represent a striving towards something that would only fully realise itself in the Unite d'Habitation. To do this, he had to take a radical view of the section, and a normative view of the plan; the inverse of the situation demonstrated at Maison Clarte.
In Clarte, it's the plans you are directed to, and they show, in an embryonic way, how Le Corbusier was trying to nestle 'units' of two story dwelling within normative construction. However to do this, he realised it was no longer the planning that was the problem but the section.
So that's why the section of the Unite d'Habitation (below top) is so fabulous, because it lays down vertical access as just the rising box that is the lift, there is no staircase under a roof light to trudge up. The stairs are just emergency measures and the emphasis shifts from vertical to horizontal; once you are out of the lift you are once more on a street, just one higher up.
This of course enabled the notion of 'streets in the sky'.

Hey Presto!

I have found myself obliged, and it is not an unpleasant task even if it is time consuming, to develop a course in the history of cities. Now Leonardo Benevelo did this in such an exhaustive fashion that one is inclined to move the other way; when faced with material enough for twenty lectures, to attempt it in three; to make enormous generalisations in the name of our common purpose. So I got it down to the European City, the American City and the Developing City.
I'm not sure about the Developing City yet, but The European City owes, it would seem to me, an enormous debt to the city block, which in turn owes itself to the Roman 'insulae', which itself owes much to the courtyard house. As shown above, the American City owes much to, well, the lift core, and originally the chimney!

Technological Utopia

Disney's Tomorrowland assured us the future looked bright. Now it doesn't, it really doesn't. Disney's representation of the future was almost entirely dependent on liberation through technology wielded by corporations, but isn't it curious, every single third wave technological gizmo; the stuff that embraces mobile phones and general internet connectivity, has hardly lead to the easy life it promised; but the complete opposite.
Today I was told I had to use an e-diary at the university, not so much under threat as obligation; that is, of course, a mechanism whereby I have to account for ALL my activities on campus ALL THE TIME. Traditionally professors do not troll around waiting for people to check what they are up to; being respected as professors not drones. In fact, it is absolutely an anathema to think that this is what professors might do; tell the administration what they are doing all day before slogging their way home as if they'd just done a shift shelf stacking.
I'm not a professor of course, my chances of such are negligible to the point of infinitesimal, for despite my knowledge base, outputs, commitment to the subject and so on, I have even refused to engage with university e-mail on a daily basis, and for good reason. I ignored it totally for decades because I distrusted the damn thing, and watched as many of my colleagues gave in, and subsequently did little else than send emails all day to no effect at all.
Meanwhile the mobile phone, in it's latest incarnation, functions less as a global communications device than an idiotic echo chamber of pathetic desire. It has fostered a fascism that has turned my own London neighbourhood in to the province of the desperate poor, the tragically strung out, and the eminent hipster. This is not good, and this is what technology has done; it has raised pond life to governance.
And even worse, despite all the CAD, BIM, and all the rest of it, can you really say the computing 'revolution' has even built a single decent house: can you really say it has made any better architecture? No.
Wake up everybody.

Great Walls I Have Known

Troy, Jerico, China, Hadrian, Berlin, plus of course Colditz and Shawshank; real and mythical, but conceptually and functionally closing the circle, ran around seven times. The beauty of the Berlin Wall lies in it's 20th Century procurement strategy; built in just one night (but with meticulous planning); first with humans, then with fence, then with prefabricated concrete pieces that culminate in that particular cross-section; angled at the foot to be able to stand without foundation, and topped with a semi circular capping to obscure it's thinness (and presumably counter the grappling iron). It was faced on the one side with the graffiti of freedom, and one the other by the killing zone, and brought down, in just one night, not just by a hoard of people, but by a media that had chivvied away at it for years, so now you might piss against in a Las Vegas casino.

Of course there was not just one wall, but a whole fence along the boundary with old Eastern Europe; fascinating (just as with Hadrian's) for where it marched in to the sea. The edges of walls are the problem; the going round and the going over and the going under, but this is something architecture enjoys sometimes for it's own sake, think Le Corbusier at Jaoul, where walls are clear planes, and where he specified that a different bricklayer should be used every three courses to provide added rusticity (stick that up your phenomenological pipe and smoke it). But historically we have been brought in to merely glamourise holes.
When is a wall a wall? I suspect Trump's wall will not be, it will be an object of myth and consternation, and as the USA reverts to being one big farmstead, we might recall Robert Frost's poem. If you don't know the poem it's called 'Mending a Wall'.

Patrik's Mies Extension

This is a proposed extension to Mies' New National Gallery Berlin by one Patrik Schumacher. Obviously, I'm aghast.
I'm also highly amused, because when you take on giants you tend to have to tread carefully, and this is not something Patrik is known for, especially recently. But here, and to our great surprise, we are offered an obvious contextualism, a distinct tipping of the cap.
All good, you might say, but look again, something looks wrong, what is it?
I think what is wrong is doing it in the first place. The New National Gallery famously doesn't work at all as a gallery, and that, you might say, wearing a particularly sophisticated hat, is it's entire point. So why on earth would you want to extend it?
This might be the first question for the architect to ask the no doubt fraught authorities who try and run the damn thing, utilising their full gamut of conceptual armour, experience and worldly knowledge, if they had been foolish enough to accept the commission in the first place. But this is something else, this, I understand, is a competition; you choose to enter in, to take on the quest, you are choosing to make a fool of yourself unless you really believe you can do it. So the problem is like that of Achilles, sitting under his long black ships on the beach, wondering if he should join the battle, and sitting there for a long time weighing it up, consulting the gods, whatever. Even Achilles had to think about not for a very long time.
 'Not on your nelly' would be the conventional mortal's response.
After long consideration (perhaps twenty five years in my case) of this building that encourages my own bowel movements, it is my view that the only thing you might just do with NNG is improve the bar.

Museums

I like museums, but not so much now they have taken on the guise of department stores. I especially like The Imperial War Museum, have done ever since I was a kid, but these days as I sit there periodically (since it is a welcome and convenient distraction from the university) studying, likely as not, 'Old Fred' the Lancaster bomber, I find myself vexed.
There is a window ledge you can sit on to inspect 'Old Fred' and those who mill around him- rarely for more than a few seconds- a snapshot of the distracted museum visitor, always anxious for the next thing, be they excited crocodiles of school kids or bad tempered old men in wheelchairs. That's the good thing about the IWM, at least it's free, I don't feel that imperative at all. 'Old Fred' has so much to offer I can go on thinking about him for days.
Architects have long taken to the museum 'experience'- including me in the nineties. But why make a Holocaust Museum when a copy of Primo Levi's 'If This Is A Man' is a so much better vehicle for historical empathy? What's with all the gratuitous effects? Or is it that people no longer even know the actual story.
Thankfully the excellent Holocaust exhibit in the IWM has been left intact- at least somebody realised nothing needed to be done- but the overall experience now is as much shop as exhibition space, as much clutter of visuals over things. Maybe, dread to think, so many of those originals have been sold off- the Focke Wolf 190, the Mustang, the Jagdpanther...or maybe just moved on to another branch. Whatever, I guess all the HD screens and so on are viewed as a cheap and instantaneous mode of communication in the spirit of the times.
In reality (sic) it's just another version of shopping, and there is a lot of shopping in the IWM, and going home happily with a 'Don't Panic' mug is certainly in the interests of the powers that be; historically not so much as anti-war as pro-patriotism.
And thinking about 'Old Fred', his original fifty five thousand parts (even with turrets and engines counted singly, and not counting rivets either) his power, his thin-ness, his bigness, his tininess, his blackness and the exploding world around him (a german eighty-eight sits smugly next to him, solid as a rock you might say) and what happened inside him and around him as a kind of living hell for ten hours at a time times thirty (and I know he was actually Fleet Air Arm so I'm extrapolating rather) gives you pause for a great deal of thought.
There is a Stassi museum in Leipzig where I remember they hadn't changed a thing. It was deeply unnerving. There's also one in eastern Berlin which, as the actual headquarters of the Stassi, is almost invisible within the urban grain. They didn't change that either.
I think we should think a bit more about museums and what we really want from them.

Architects and Developers

For the first time we are going to be running a class within our  'Ideas in Architecture' course titled 'Profit'. Profit doesn't become an issue until it is hard to find; certainly the case today, as the traditional role of the architect is not so much under threat as under water.
It's been a long time coming and we've fudged it over and over. Joseph Paxton, as far as I know, was party to the first design and built contract designed to outmanoeuvre the bemused architects of 1851. By the early 1990's, the title 'Architect' was fundamentally challenged, and it took a big fight back, including a whole raft of prescriptions from the RIBA as far as education was concerned, to steady the ship.
Back then I was for deregulation; I thought good architecture would succeed without good 'Architects'; that talented individuals would take to the task who would be valued for their skills, working within co-operative organisations!
But the subsequent financialisation of everything has made Design and Build look a milestone. Today, just to succeed, small time architects have to become developers themselves (or work in giant corporations) that is unless they go to become in house architects within pub chains (apparently these are the best paid opportunities) where god knows what they do other than 'defurbish' properties with  cast offs.
Meanwhile those architect friends of mine who couldn't stand their developers (who suddenly started behaving like architects) gave up the business.
We don't teach any of this. An architecture course is not a real estate course. But we do encourage a lot of fantasy in the name of 'design', almost to the point that it is hardly design at all, but illustrated storytelling. Witness this exchange at the Bartlett:

Prof:       'Put a giraffe in that drawing, giraffes are funny...'
Student:  'But I don't think giraffes are funny!'
Prof:       'Just put a giraffe in the drawing.'

Meanwhile, if you are working as a developer, you'd better put your time into those gross to net ratios. An architect estimating 80% when it actually comes out closer to 75% is, in the end, responsible for people sipping their cappuccino on a postage stamp of 'public space' beneath 30 stories of office space. You can't blame developers for making money, but you can encourage architects to take lessons from Mies van de Rohe, who managed to broker that piazza on Madison Avenue and who certainly understood his gross to net.