Mark Chalmers

Architecture students beware – it’s a jungle out there.

In the next few weeks, young monkeys will leave the protective bosom of the troop, and make their way into the jungle.  So far during their sheltered upbringing, they have learned about the world indirectly, and their responses have been carefully conditioned.  They can distinguish “good” from “bad”; they can discern, and they can declaim pastiche … all thanks to the jungle elders who taught them to admire the chest-beating antics of the mighty silverbacks. 

As Rudyard Kipling knew, every jungle has its king, and the particular megafauna in charge of this stretch of upland forest are loud, aggressive characters who like to impose themselves on those further down the food chain.  Sure, there are other threats – sleek silent predators with gleaming teeth, and unspeakable things which lurk in the mangroves – but the bellowing of the Great Apes makes a lasting impression on the young monkeys.  Something with so much presence must be important – right? 

All that chest-beating and branch-shaking must have a purpose.  They make so much noise and fuss, they must be in charge, isn’t that so?  These are the beasts at the top of the tree, after all …

One youngster harboured a desire to work for one of the greatest apes.  The latter’s name was Maximillian.  He was greater than the other apes in many ways – he had his own private jet, for example.  His wife dressed only in Prada.  He rose into the tree canopy using his own private elevator.  The young monkey was hugely impressed when she met Maximillian, overpowered by his musk of charisma and his “presence” – hence she was delighted when she found a place waiting for her after the interview. 

In fact, she found it disarmingly easy to join the troop, and apart from a close circle of confidants around Maxi, the youngster found herself surrounded by young primates just like herself.  All fresh-faced, keen and looking for direction.  So keen in fact, that they approached the Great Ape with deference and worked gratis, or for next to nothing.  Strangely, that earned them his disdain rather than respect.

Once she had her start, the youngster was dismayed to find that Maximillian wasn’t good to be around.  Being alpha male meant that he had to spend part of each day beating his chest, because his life was a constant struggle to maintain status in the jungle hierarchy.  He scanned the papers, earwigged the gossip and tuned in to the jungle telegraph to find out when he was mentioned, and with how much deference, compared to the other silverbacks.  If he appeared to be slipping, he grew tetchy.  For example, the youngster learned that she couldn’t discuss other Great Apes within his earshot: if anyone did, he bared his teeth and roared at the youngsters, occasionally sweeping several of them off a branch in a fit of pique.  They didn’t try to climb back up.

At other times, Maximillian was quiet and sly, creeping around to find out what the monkeys said about him in private, behind his back.  Yet even she knew not to listen to the chimps’ idle chatter.  She had imagined that Maxi would be far too busy, and too thick-skinned, to worry about trivia like this, but apparently not so.  The youngster had hoped that she would benefit from, and be enriched by, working with Maximillian, but it turned out to be a one-way transaction. 

The troop worked on into the night, when everything in the jungle apart from the bats and night-crawlers roosted and slept.  The hiss of carbide lamps, and the circling of great dark moths, grew to be familiar experiences to her.  When the sun came up the next day, they were all shattered, but providing Maximillian was off travelling the continent in his private jet, work ground to a halt and they caught up with sleep.  Everyone knew it wasn’t a good way to operate: it sapped their will as much as their energy, yet it was perpetuated by Maximillian.

The same unreality extended to the detail of the work they did.  Maxi had a licence from his clients to do whatever he liked – the lions, tigers and bears of this world don’t curtail his budget, and never restricted his ability to decide on their behalf what they should have.  So he specified Carrara marble (the most expensive kind) on every surface, and always used lights made by iGibboni (sorry!), the famously expensive makers of mangrove chandeliers. 

This is not a true reflection of how the world works, as all the other monkeys out there are on a budget.  Maximillian seemed to be happy, provided everything specified was suitably expensive, and that drawings and models were ready on time.  Trouble erupted when he jumped off his jet just hours before the next big meeting, and reviewed the work they had produced for it.  If he didn’t like it – and often he picked on something he himself had decided on weeks ago – then there was a chorus of screaming, bellowing and rending.  Pack up your things and go, he roared after whichever CAD monkey took the blame.

This year, more than before, things are tough in the jungle.  For each position, there are countless jostling cybergibbons – all of them prepared to work for peanuts.  Having grown used to peanuts, it may take years for them to raise their sights – even when things improve.  Meantime, Maximillian lives up to his name (he maks a million in fee income alone, nevermind the personal appearances at lectures, and product design endorsements) – whilst letting go of troupes at the edge of his empire.  Hopefully the chattering of macaques will drown out the bad P.R.  Nevertheless, there are fewer beasts at the top of the pyramid prepared to let him crave their indulgence.  Has he changed his approach?  What do you think?

Why does he act the way he does? asked our youngster after a few weeks in Maximillian’s employ.  ”Because he gets away with it,” replied one of the monkeys who had worked for him a little longer.  You see, Maximillian travels the world, courting every other species for work, giving lectures, gaining professorships, honours and other bays – but he doesn’t look after his own. 

The young ones who arrive each summer are part-formed: he was once just like them, but he’s long ago forgotten that.  They rely on him to show them how the jungle really works, to take on a pastoral role while they find their feet and gain confidence, but he shows them only himself.  The strong ones who demonstrate character end up fighting him, and are ejected from the troop.  The weaker ones are cowed, and eventually limp away having lost enthusiasm and motivation.  Yet each time a monkey leaves, it takes a little of the troop with it, and so the collective memory of “how we do things” is lost.  Maximillian chooses to ignore that.

This youngster was smart enough to discover that although she normally lived on the lower branches, she could still climb to the top of the tree occasionally, to see how the primates live.  More importantly, she knew she could climb back down again, leaving them to it.

Everyone can tell when you have a big project on site, because you start being philosophical about contractors, or Sympathy for the Construction Industry.  We have a main contractor from over the North Channel, and a cladding contracts manager who is the spit of Samuel Beckett - with an aquiline face and glasses pushed up into his shock of grey hair.

So we shot the breeze.  What conclusion did we reach?  Of the many analogies you can draw to illuminate how building contractors operate – a three ring circus; the Muppet Show; or an anarchists’ symposium – the most apt is that of a medieval court.

In reality, whilst they may see themselves as progressive, the Main Board directors of large contractors actually preside over an organisation which is feudal, and at least 500 years out of date.  Many construction firms cling to hierarchies, and confrontational ways of working – they think of themselves as a conquering army, and as a result, a passion for the fight overtakes good business sense.  Perhaps that explains why their profit margins are so low despite their high turnover and huge amounts of capital employed. 

Yet the power of the analogy really lies in what happens on site.  I’ve watched several of the big contractors at close quarters – the stock market-listed leviathans – and they strongly resemble each other in how they do what they do.  Immediately the contract is let, they arrive on site from elsewhere, much like the medieval court which voyaged around Scotland  and set up in the fields around the castle.  In this case, the tented camp takes the form of the site establishments: the huts.

Hut City is a diagram of the contractor’s power structure.  Although the Lords Temporal aren’t here, room has to be made available in the admin offices for the courtiers, including a Darnley figure in the QS’s room.  Visiting statesmen are accommodated in the meeting room, and there’s a retinue of camp followers who are provided with a staff mess to change into their courtly rigger boots.  The men-at-arms are given a wee buckie and tabards marked “Security”.  Then of course there is the baggage train, who deposit their shipping containers around the standard, just like a stockade.

Everything is painted in the house colours, and that livery even extends to clothing and tool boxes.  Whilst that identifies everyone, it also makes it easy for fifth-columnists to merge with the ranks.  It is surprisingly easy for a spy in the court to move freely: all it takes is a hat and tabard matching all the others wandering around on site.  I know this because I’ve done it, and it proves that “security” on sites is illusory.  Why would you climb the stockade of spiky-topped Heras fencing, when you can walk directly over the drawbridge and in through the main gate?  That’s called being hidden in plain sight.

When a small, country-based builder takes on a project, he puts a portable bog and a tool store on site, then each day two or three of his vans turn up, filled with time-served tradesmen.  By contrast, when the Court of the Crimson King comes to town, the resulting site establishment costs are crippling.  By creating Hut City, you create a hiding place for the site management, who are already far removed from the lads on the tools.  The site is by now a muddy plain resembling a battlefield, churned up by modern siege engines running on crawler tracks.

Don’t be fooled, archaeologists of the present, by the laser rangefinders, hydraulic piledrivers, and all-terrain dumpers: the early stages of construction are still dirty, crude and primitive.  They take as their precedent the work of Dark Ages military engineers (the original “engineers”) who undermined city walls, built massive catapults, and rode in Trojan horses.  Modern methods of construction have nothing on this: wall ties lie strewn like crossbow bolts, towers of scaffolding lay siege, and the impression of a mailed fist marks the place where the M&E sub fell out with the ceiling installers. 

Construction is bad neighbour activity, much like pitched battles, because of the noise, filth, and the fog of war.  At 7.30am sharp, a row of excavators and articulated dumptrucks are started up: the air fills with blue smoke, coarse language and the throbbing of many large capacity diesel engines.  All this reassures the contractor that “there’s something gaein on”, even if he’s “jist steerin up the mud.”

So with his warlike attitude, an army of hangers-on, and the paraphenalia of battle, the big contractor needs to take the fight to the enemy.  Or rather, he opens a second front.  On one hand, the conflict continues with the architect over extras and delays; on the other, the sub-contractors endure a second round of tendering.  In this, they are paying tribute a more powerful force.  The royal house is building up a war chest, and imposing payment terms on the vassals is a good way of accomplishing that. 

Anyhow, the analogy of military misadventure could be spun out for entertainment value, but it can be swiftly routed by noting what came after the Dark Ages … Enlightenment.  250 years ago, architects were called the “Masters of Works”.  A client proposed to construct something: the architect liaised with him, then designed, organised and oversaw building work.  The Adam Brothers offered a turnkey service, much as an architect-developer with a direct project management arm would do today. 

The Victorians, by professionalising design, and splitting it from construction, set us back by several centuries.  That lost time has yet to be recovered.  Only by re-uniting the folk who draw buildings, with the folk who make them, will we drag the construction industry out of its Dark Ages.

A while ago, I wrote about the Beech Starship, a business aircraft which looks like an artefact from a future civilisation.  By contrast, the DH103 Hornet fighter appears hopelessly old-fashioned – yet it reached almost 500mph in level flight, which made it the fastest piston-engined aircraft of its day.  It could cruise at the speed of today’s jet airliners, and outran the first jet-powered fighters.  The chances are, if you took a Hornet to the air races at Reno in Nevada today, it would out-run all the souped-up Mustangs and Sea Furies, setting a new absolute speed record.


In many senses, the Hornet was the piston-engined aircraft perfected.

A few weeks ago, the BBC showed a documentary about Eric “Winkle” Brown, the Scots-born test pilot.  As a naval aviator, he set a record for the number of landings on aircraft carriers which has never been beaten, and when in his unassuming way Brown describes the Hornet as the favourite from all the different aircraft he flew, that means something.  Captain Brown has flown more types of aircraft than anyone else in history.


Eric Brown is a top candidate for the Most Interesting Man in the World.  As a schoolboy, he attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and met a WW1 flying ace.  During WW2, he escaped from the wreckage of a torpedoed ship, helped to liberate Belsen and took 2,000 enemy prisoners armed only with a pistol – not to mention a few close calls where he had to abort and promptly GTFO using a parachute.  After the War ended, he interrogated leading Nazis including Hermann Goering, aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel and designer Willie Messerschmitt.  Brown was the first man to fly a jet on and off an aircraft carrier, and he set aviation records that will almost certainly never be broken.


The de Havilland Hornet was his favourite, "For the simple reason it was over-powered.  This is an unusual feature in an aircraft, you could do anything on one engine, almost, that you could do on two.  It was a 'hot rod Mosquito' really, I always described it as like flying a Ferrari in the sky." The Hornet was the fastest twin piston-engined operational combat aircraft in the world while in service, and the first aircraft to demonstrate a cartwheel manoeuvre.

"For aerobatics the Sea Hornet was absolute bliss. The excess of power was such that manoeuvres in the vertical plane can only be described as rocket-like. Even with one propeller feathered the Hornet could loop with the best single-engine fighter. I had felt such absolute confidence that I was mentally relaxed … Indeed, there was something about the Sea Hornet that made me feel that I had total mastery of it.”

"In my book the Sea Hornet ranks second to none for harmony of control, performance characteristics and, perhaps most important, in inspiring confidence in its pilot. For sheer exhilarating flying enjoyment, no aircraft has ever made a deeper impression on me.”

At the root of any aircraft’s design is the equation which resolves power, weight, lift, drag and trim into performance.  In simplistic terms, power makes an aircraft climb whereas attitude varies its speed.  The Hornet’s high rate of climb came thanks to the Rolls-Royce Merlin, arguably the engine of the 20th Century, which in this case developed more than 2000hp from 27 litres of swept volume.  Just like the Mosquito, the Hornet had a pair of Merlins but in this case they were faired into streamlined “power eggs”.



The Hornet’s top speed is partly the function of a low co-efficient of drag arising from a sleek fuselage and a laminar flow wing; this thin wing was made possible by new materials.  The Hornet’s long range came thanks to its light weight; both strength and light weight derived from de Havilland’s early mastery of composite construction.



During the 1930’s, aircraft structures evolved from doped fabric stretched across an ash frame, to the geodesic spaceframe of steel tubes which Barnes Wallis used in the Wellington bomber, and eventually to all-metal stressed skin structures.  De Havillands went their own way, searching for a different method of achieving strength and lightness.  They settled on timber, but rather than a load-bearing timber frame (like a Morgan car or a timber kit house) they developed the first composite monocoque.



Unlike the Beech Starship, a revolutionary aircraft which used carbon composites, the Hornet wasn’t a great leap into the unknown; it’s an evolutionary aircraft, albeit one at the very apex of its line of evolution.  De Havillands had been working on composites for a decade before the first Hornet took flight - although their initial objective was to build stronger, lighter propellers.



In order to cope with more powerful engines, propellers had grown in diameter, gained more blades, and their tip speeds were approaching the sound barrier.  As a result, the centrifugal forces at the propeller hub had increased to the point where there were many catastrophic failures.  De Havilland Propellers worked with Aero Research at Duxford to overcome the drawbacks of laminated timber props, successfully using phenol-formaldehyde resin in the manufacture of propellers.  The attraction of this material was that, with a density of around half that of aluminium alloy, centrifugal forces at the root were greatly reduced.



De Havillands was a rare aircraft company which made everything for itself.  Piston engines were built at Stag Lane in Edgware, then jet engines and later rocket motors plus of course complete aircraft at Hatfield, Leavesden and later Hawarden.  As a result, it was able to cross-fertilise materials research between propellors, wings and fuselage design.



The work on propellers “spun off” into fuselage and wing structures for the (almost) all-timber Mosquito, which the wartime Press christened the Wooden Wonder.  The Mosquito was built from sandwich panels consisting of thin skins of plywood veneer bonded to a core of end-grain balsa wood.  The core functions just like the web of an I-beam while the plywood skins function as the flanges.  The sandwich panel's bending stiffness is proportional to the core thickness, in the same way that an I-beam becomes stiffer as the web deepens.  Doubling the core thickness yields a panel roughly six times stronger and 12 times stiffer.



At a time when other WW2 combatants were desperately trying to smelt cobalt, vanadium and other rare metals into exotic alloys, it seems bizarre that de Havillands were in the market for balsa wood.  You can only assume that German spies put this down to British eccentricity, if they even remarked on it at all, yet Baltek’s sawmills in America struggled to keep up with demand.  Today the technology seems so accessible; hobbyists and model-makers have access to the same plywood veneers, balsa wood and epoxy glues that de Havillands used.


Plywood was a relatively new material, and also a composite, with plies of different thicknesses and orientations providing degrees of strength and stiffness.  As well as de Havilland themselves, the Mosquito was built by Roe, Gloster, Phillips & Powis and even Venesta – the forerunner of Venesta Cubicles which is still in business today.  In 1937 their "Venesta" plywood and "Plymax" metal-faced plywood made them an ideal choice as fabricators of ply composite aircraft such as the Mosquito. 

The Mosquito was built by the furniture industry, which was mostly based around its traditional centre in Buckinghamshire: incidentally, that’s the reason High Wycombe was one of the most heavily-bombed London suburban towns. The industry had a long history (Defoe mentions it) in the town and in the 1940’s there were still many local manufacturers. The Windsor chair was its most famous product, but practically every other sort of furniture was also made. Components for the Mosquito were reportedly produced by Marples and G-Plan, and supplying the materials was a multi-national effort: the frames used Alaskan spruce and British ash, the sandwich used 3-ply Canadian birch plywood and Ecuadorian balsawood.

The DH103 Hornet evolved from the DH98 Mosquito - and as is the way of things, it became lighter, faster, more powerful and stronger. Both aircraft used variations of a pre-formed plywood monocoque shell strengthened with spruce stringers and constructed using high-strength synthetic bonding resins.  This technique had been pioneered on the famous DH.88 Comet racers, and would also be used to great effect on the Dragonfly light twin and the Albatross airliner of 1938.  One step forward from the Mosquito was the way de Havilland built the Hornet’s wing spars, and another was the wing surfaces themselves.



Mosquito wing spars have all-wooden tension and compression booms, but this would have been impossible for the Hornet, because of the large cross-section of wood necessary for the more highly-loaded wing.   The problem was overcome by making the tension booms from aluminium extrusions, and using wood for the spar webs and compression booms.  A layer of veneer was bonded to the aluminium parts then everything was assembled to form a spar of remarkably low weight and high strength. 

Moulded wood veneers of a type that we’d now term cross-laminated timber were combined with more conventional parallel layered glulam to produce spars of amazing accuracy and complex geometry.  Tapered and kinked spars with “L”-shaped sections were formed using this technique, which was originally developed for manufacturing Isokon furniture.  Isokon is well known in architectural circles, thanks to the Lawn Road Flats designed by Wells Coates…

The Hornet’s wings comprised an aerofoil with a composite wood and metal internal structure, with a stressed birch-ply double upper skin and an under surface of reinforced “Alclad”.  This was the first time that aluminium had been bonded to timber in a structural fashion.  Lift acting on the Hornet’s wing meant that the metal skin on the underside of the wing went into tension, and the ply-balsa composite went into compression – so the materials’ inherent qualities were used to best advantage.



The idea of combining skins of ply and aluminium with a lightweight core was a conceptual leap born of on a new generation of synthetic adhesives.  De Havillands’ composite structures relied upon a new epoxy resin developed by Aero Research.  This glue, “Redux 775”, was developed in 1941 as the first modern, synthetic structural adhesive for metals - and it was first used in the Hornet Mk1 which was built at Hatfield.  Hornet construction, like that of the Mosquito before it, used similar techniques as modern fibreglass wet layup.  The positive mould was covered with wax, then strips of thin veneer were laid up in different directions to improve the tensile strength in all directions, just as today you would lay up glass or carbonfibre mats.



The first skin would be covered by a sandwich layer of balsa wood, followed by another layer of veneer.  Metal fittings were embedded in the wooden layers and a low voltage applied to heat the resin electrically, which speeded up curing.  Once everything was dry, the fuselage or wing half would be removed from the mould then after installation of some formers, cables and wiring, glued to the other half.  Finally the fuselage would be covered in another layer of thin wood, covering the glued joint, then covered in aircraft linen, doped and painted to improve aerodynamic smoothness.



In 1948, de Havillands acquired an aircraft factory at Hawarden Airfield near Chester: it was used to build and assemble the Hornet Mk3, while other parts were manufactured at the firm’s factory in nearby Lostock.  Incidentally, Hawarden is now called Broughton, and after de Havilland became part of Hawker Siddeley it developed sophisticated wings for their airliners: today, it builds every wing for every Airbus airliner, and is owned by GKN.  The “N” in GKN stands for Nettlefolds, and when the Hornet was in production they had several huge factories in the Black Country, stamping out millions of cross-head screws an hour.  Today, GKN uses carbon fibre to build composite aero-structures which owe a great deal to the principles that de Havilland developed three quarters of a century ago. 

The Hornet’s fuselage was built in two halves which joined together on the centreline, so called “egg carton” construction using cold moulding to form the curves.  This monocoque structure gave the fuselage a high degree of redundancy which meant that the aircraft could sustain terrible damage yet keep flying.  Many Mosquitos returned home missing large chunks of wings, fins and control surfaces, shot away by enemy cannon fire.  Timber composites also avoided the hidden dangers of metal fatigue, which de Havilland fell foul of with their Comet airliner during the 1950’s.



Without the work of Aero Research and de Havilland Aircraft during the 1930’s and 1940’s, it’s arguable that there would be no plywood composites or structural adhesives, hence the SIP panel and the JJI joist wouldn’t exist, either.  It’s also worth noting that the Beech Starship, which was hailed as revolutionary in form and construction, isn’t as original as I implied.  The Starship was also built in two halves, and epoxy resins were also used to bond its composites together.  Just like de Havillands, forty years before them.


Although it marked the apex of de Havilland’s piston engine development, there’s no sense in which de Havillands developed a Pygmalion-like relationship with the Hornet.  Even as it first flew in 1944, the firm was already building jet-propelled aircraft, so the Hornet’s career was cut short.  After the DH98 Mosquito and DH103 Hornet, De Havilland’s plywood-balsa-plywood sandwich was later used to form the fuselage of the Vampire and Sea Venom jets. 

De Havilland refined the assembly process: steel bands were latched onto heated jigs with quick release toggles, to ensure smooth fuselage cross-sections.  Adhesive curing cycles were carefully instrumented and automated.  Smaller glue-laminated components such as the engine intake ducts used thin timber strips which were cold-formed on jigs to tight radii.  Nonetheless, the Hornet's gift to us all is composite construction, which the designers of racing cars, airliners, yachts, buildings and even fridge freezers take for granted.



The late Martin Pawley was fascinated by these technology transfers, and the crossovers between architecture and other fields.  As a columnist in the AJ, BD and so forth he wrote about the design of tube trains, cars and aircraft – seeing them as complementary to architecture.  He recognised the truisms that racing improves the breed, and war pushes technology forwards faster than peace.  While this bandwagon was passing, I thought I'd jump onto it…



Pawley was in tune with the spirit prevailing during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when Richard Horden built a series of houses using off-the-shelf components from racing yachts, then Rogers and Foster completed a series of buildings which borrowed from the automotive and aerospace industries, such as neoprene gaskets and super-formed metals.  This climate gave birth to a thousand architectural dissertations about Lotus sports cars, Slingsby sailplanes and McLaren's F1 operation. 

Unwittingly, they echoed a pattern from 50 years before, when wartime firms desperately hunted around for peacetime outlets once hostilities ended.  De Havilland were fortunate, as their focus shifted readily from military to civilian aircraft.  Venesta gave up flying and came to specialise in toilet cubicles and IPS systems.  Others were not so lucky.



What about the legacy of Ronald Bishop, who designed the Hornet?  He should be remembered for helping to win the War using pioneering materials: but today it seems that War means rousing musicals, martial style (smart uniforms never go out of fashion) and the cult of the Great Man.  Our superficial treatment of that era ignores Bishop and his counterparts Barnes Wallis, RJ Mitchell and Roy Chadwick who were responsible for the Wellington, Spitfire and Lancaster respectively.  They were complete designers, in the sense that they harnessed materials science, structures, aerodynamics, manufacturing techniques as well as considering damage tolerance and repairability. 

They also had a sense of purpose which is difficult for us to grasp now: they were part of Churchill’s enormous enterprise which stretched from shadow factories making widgets to the invention of operational research. 

The sadness is that no Hornets survive at all today, although there are rumours that an entire squadron was dismantled and buried under an airfield in Malaysia when they became surplus to requirements.  It seems unlikely that anyone will disinter them, but you never know…

Some images used here are courtesy of the Hornet Project website, which has temporarily disappeared from the web.

ANOTHER POST?  Don't you do anything else with your time?  Don't you have a life?  Yes, and each year my social diary includes the local degree show – this year, Duncan of Jordanstone is local, a couple of years ago it was ECA, and before that, Scott Sutherland.  However, each time I visit a show, I end up ruminating about the whole construct of architectural education, rather than just the drawings on the wall.

The crits are over for another year, and wide-eyed graduates emerge, blinking, into the sunlight.  The best of their work remains on the wall for a few days more, before disappearing forever into a portfolio under the bed in their parents’ spare room.  In a few years’ time, the CAD files will be unreadable by the current version of Autocad, and the platter of the hard drive they’re stored on will stutter and skip, refusing to be read.  If the graduate is lucky, the slightly-dog-eared sheets of Fabriano run through the Designjet will remain as a memento of happier days…

For now, though, those drawings are fresh and the ideas are up for scrutiny.

We have a fascination with the intangible means by which tangible things come into being.   We make vain attempts to get closer to the work, and we struggle to externalise what goes on in other folks’ heads.  Their work is tangible, but the thoughts preceding it are immaterial, so that in the end we focus on the creator, since we can apprehend the person more easily than the process.  It’s easier in the case of architecture students, because the work is unmediated, and students are relieved if anyone takes an interest.

So, what is this architecture thing?  Is it just as much about the architect as his or her creation?  What do this year’s graduates have to look forward to?

We may visualise Scarpa, Lewerentz or Corbusier as a figure in dark, sober clothes: an old man, peering through glasses, thanks to poor eyesight born of decades spent staring at drawings.   He leans forward, engrossed in laying lines onto paper; in front of him, a wall of shelves crammed with books, postcards, architectural models, interesting bits of stone, photographs and boxes of slides. 

His nodding head and shoulders adopt the set of the anglepoise lamp clamped to the drawing board.   His forearms sit on the cant of the board, along with a clutch pencil, a roll of detail paper and a box of aquarelles.   At his elbow is an assistant – perhaps an a trusted associate, more often a recent graduate – someone who is grateful to be there, who may work long hours for little gain, in return for the opportunity to see genius in action. 

The space is large, high-ceilinged, with northlight thrown deep into it by tall windows and diffused by raw, whitewashed walls.   In the corner shadows are black steel planchests set onto a woodblock floor, and hung on the wall is a giant model consisting of layers of balsa and boxwood built up into buildings and contours.   The model represents a whole city block, torn apart and recreated.

Hold on there son, Genius, did you say?

Kurt Vonnegut's novel “Bluebeard”, posits that three unusual and unlikely types of people are needed are needed for any revolution to be successful.  Architecture, I guess, is no different.

“Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.  The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

“The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius – a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."

“The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."

“The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey."

“Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top – Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia's, Christ being the one in Christianity's.
He says that if you can't get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.”

If the keen-eyed and keen-eared graduate is lucky, she may have landed on her feet.  She may be in the company of Vonnegut’s first sort, the authentic genius.  In which case, she’ll discover that the design studio is as important a creation as the image of the master himself –  it is neither drawing office nor artist’s workshop, but a hive where the lights burn all night and in that, it replicates architecture school, where work sometimes continues through the wee hours, fuelled by caffeine and desperation.

However, architecture school still looms large in her mind.  She is conflicted.  From whom will she learn best: the professor who teaches, or the godhead who builds?  She has a deep suspicion that the staff at the architecture school look upon the students as being Vonnegut’s third sort, the kind of people who open their mouth during crits and let their belly rumble.  She suspects they view those students as Christmas turkeys.

A young woman – let’s say she’s Danish – pins up the drawings of her final scheme for a crit jury.   After several days with little sleep, she is about to experience the serial inquisition which terrorises architecture students.   She lays off for fifteen minutes about the concepts behind her design, the influences she has paid homage to.  

The prof. sits with smouldering pipe, listening intently, then pronounces – “Aye lass, that’s aa richt and richt enough…” at which point he fixes her with beady eye, and continues with vehement emphasis – “but FAR’S THE LAVVIES?”

This is the knock-out blow, and having worked through the night, her resistance is low and she is quite unprepared for it.  She fights back tears as she tries to engage this giant bearded man, with smoke issuing from his head, about “architecture”.  He, however, is looking for a different thing entirely, confusingly also called ARCHITECTURE.  It’s a practical art: surely you can see that?  The crit is not a success.

Yet it is the image of the master, rather than the prof, which is the lasting one which students fix on.  Having left architecture school, the acolyte takes her opportunity to get as close as possible to the fountainhead.  Most of her time, she exists in a different place, with unstable computers, tins of dead Rotrings, and irate clients who telephone to ask why water is pouring through their light fittings.

Her other time – her “own” time, often late into the evening – is spent hunched over the master’s board, taking a junior role in debate, as sounding board, occasionally devil’s advocate.   She may not contribute positively to the creation, but the master uses her to knock out the negatives (in both senses).   Thus the scales slowly fall away from her eyes…

For my next post … I may actually get to the point, and do a review of the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show.  Possibly the Scott Sutherland show, too.

“Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless, starving wretch to lay him down and die.  Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets, at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.”

If you recognise that quote from Oliver Twist, but don’t think it has any bearing on your life or work, then you’re surely in the wrong profession.

I was down in Edinburgh, and as tea-time approached, I headed towards Waverley from the offices of the firm where I was completing some urban design work.  First, I saw a sheet of cardboard on the ground.  Then I noticed the young woman huddled in a blanket, with her feet drawn up towards her, in the doorway of a tenement on the edge of the New Town.  Her face was a study of inscrutability; she had switched off against the cold.  Passers-by barely registered as they hurried past.

This, remember, is one of Europe’s great cities.  Affluence is relative, but wealth is absolute.  Despite everything which has happened over the past five years, we live in a country which is still one of the richest in the world.  If the will was there, we could virtually eradicate homelessness and the need to beg for money.  The fact that we haven’t done so damns government, churches and charities: but most of all it challenges our moral courage and the good intentions we voice when we see homeless people.

I don’t care how the young woman landed in that tenement doorway in the snow – it’s none of my business, even if she’d wanted to tell me – but it’s an affront to our society that she felt she had no other option.  On reflection, she didn’t need cash, although on the level of human empathy, a couple of quid for a roll and a hot drink would make a huge difference on a winter’s evening.  Yet that would treat the symptoms, but not the disease.

Perhaps the young woman’s problems spiral from the housing shortage, which isn’t down to an absolute lack of buildings, but a result of economics.  Mortgages are too expensive, and there is a lack of starter homes and small flats.  As a result, more people have to rent privately, so rentals increase.  That increase in rental yields drives landlords to buy up more housing stock, so the problem worsens and more people look to social housing. 

However, although there are lots of large houses and executive flats lying empty, unsold for years due to their high cost, there aren’t enough housing association flats or council houses to go around.  More people end up homeless, and end up in temporary accommodation like B&B’s.  Those who fall off the end of that chain, end up sofa surfing or on the streets.  If they’re lucky, they may get a place in a night shelter.

Perhaps she was crouched in a doorway as a result of a drug habit.  Or mental illness, divorce, drink, unemployment, breakdown … It’s a measure of our civilisation that any of these personal tragedies could result in someone ending up without a roof over their head.  Rather than cash, she possibly needed help to quit her habit, to get clean and get away from the people who had dragged into this state, and help to get a roof back over her head.  Our society is wealthy enough to provide an umbrella for those who really need it.

Contrary to what the Tory Party claimed, there is such a thing as society.  We don’t have to provide huge “hand outs”, because putting a roof over everyone’s head isn’t a financial or economic issue - but a practical one.  The property industry is in huge surplus - not financially, but materially.  Drug rehabilitation projects, such as Calton Athletic, and community healthcare practices, need premises.  Think of all the unlet offices, empty flats and derelict buildings: a tiny proportion given over to bedrooms, kitchens, workshops, could provide for folk who’ve ended up on the street.  Some buildings could be adapted very simply, others could be renovated, incidentally creating work for the people they are designed to help.

When I reached Waverley and found a seat on a train heading northwards, I opened my book for the journey - a book about the life and work of Colin Ward.  Following Russian thinkers like Kropotkin and Herzen, Ward was a passionate believer in co-operativism and mutual aid.  He believed that politics should nurture small-scale initiatives like friendly societies, mutuals, credit unions and the like, which in turn would foster self-build housing, allotments, adventure playgrounds and other things which folk can do for themselves to improve their own lives.  Thus a huge range of modest projects would replace the tyranny of giant, centrally-planned policies which governments like to impose on the people who voted for them. 

The current government sees people like the young woman in St Stephen Street as a burden on society.  The mass media presses its telephoto lens into the face of human tragedy – only if that face belongs to celebrity.  To the hungry addict or abused teenager begging on its doorstep, it turns it back.  Collectively, we could help.  In fact, if architecture can’t help those who most need our help, then it has failed.  After reflecting on Colin Ward’s manifesto of gentle anarchism, I recalled one of my friends, whose email address includes the phrase, “compassionate fury”.  Rather than pity, shame or disgust, that is surely what we should feel when we see poverty and suffering on the streets of our cities.

As a parting shot, compassionate fury could also direct the activities of under-employed architects, and graduates who can’t find conventional jobs with architectural practices.  I challenge anyone who has set themselves up recently to provide community engagement, participation sessions and neighbourhood consultations, to demonstrate the social worth of their work when they consider the desperation which is manifest in Scottish cities.

Ah yes, reply the engagers, but homelessness is outwith our terms of reference.  We won’t get grants from the Scottish Government to help those who are homeless (therefore we won’t make any money ourselves!)  In fact, although we can’t admit it openly – if communities were encouraged to go down the Colin Ward route of self-help and mutual aid, there would be no need at all for the community engagement, participation sessions and neighbourhood consultations we provide – and all the effort and money spent on them could be redirected. 

Perhaps that would be no bad thing.  If we can’t help those who are in most desperate need of our help, then we will need to admit that nothing has improved since Dickens’ time, 150 years ago.

There is an inherent beauty in machines, perhaps because they take on a life of their own, in a way that buildings never could.  They are often mere tools created to overcome the challenges of the world – terrain, gravity, weather – yet we look on them to impose order on a disorderly universe.

As a child of Meccano and Lego, I was always interested in making things.  Sometimes the parts came in kit form, sometimes I rummaged for scrap iron, pulley blocks, angle irons and so forth.  Making a scale model of a crawler crane was one project: I had a single-cylinder Villiers engine from an old Ransomes “Typhoon” mower earmarked as a prime mover, and 56lb. lumps of pig iron set aside as a counterweight.  The kinetics of craning, slewing and winching have fascinated ever since, and I guess there’s always the bonus of some entertainment when things go wrong.

Later, this childhood interest combined with the books I was reading, such as Lebbeus Woods’ “War and Architecture”, and Paul Virilio’s “Unknown Quantity”.  The latter is quite unlike anything else I’ve read: Virilio explores a philosophical approach towards unpredictability and disaster.  Once I’d read it through a couple of times, it clicked – here is a rational response to the seeming chaos of the world, from earthquakes and hurricanes to the smaller scale disorder and disasters of building sites.


Truckmixer in the mud

Having a project on site opens your eyes: the ground opens up while a truckmixer is reversing, the shifting sands swallow an excavator, cranes topple over and have to be rescued, lorries get stuck in muddy fields.  Watching a vehicle being extracted from a morass is always interesting: when the ground doesn’t have sufficient bearing capacity, the wheels sink in, and the vehicle ends up resting on the rails of its chassis.  A massive tractive effort may be required to pull it clear of the bog’s suction, perhaps using a Traxcavator or Cat D12 bulldozer if you happen to have one handy...

A perennial challenge is delivering materials to site without the need for double-handling.  Ideally you want a vehicle which can drive straight off the road onto the site.  Back in the early days of truckmixer, the influence of wartime ingenuity was still felt.  Boughton Engineering are best known today for the big “rollatruck” skips which demolition contractors use; when full, they’re collected by an eight wheeler using a giant hydraulic hook which clasps the skip end and hauls it onto the chassis.  However, they made their name during the 1940’s building all-drive lorry chassis for the Army, and in the peace which followed, they used their experience of all terrain lorries to convert standard Bedfords into 6x6 drive Boughtons with low-ratio gearboxes and diff locks.  The end results were road-going lorries capable of driving through construction sites.


Scammell S24 tank tractor

On the other hand, a “normal” truck stuck in a hole can become a full-blown recovery job, perhaps requiring 50-tonne cranes and an ex-Army Scammell S24 tank tractor.  The exercise begins with baulks of timber, snatch blocks, Tirfor winches, and a silent prayer to the Gods of Unconventional Lifting …  Lorry rescue is a specialist business, and once freed, heavy goods vehicles are never towed on rope or chains.  The two vehicles are connected by an umbilical cord in the form of an air line (since, unless there’s compressed air in the stranded vehicle’s tanks, its brakes will stay applied), but the towing lorry does the braking for both vehicles, with all the retardation transferred through a rigid steel towbar.

Laurel and Hardy made the most of getting stuck, and often ended up lying face down in the mud, with a Model T minus all its bodywork, a great cloud of black smoke, and a braying donkey looking on … I can sympathise.  One day I arrived on site to discover the contractor trying to rescue a cherrypicker which was trapped in the glaur.  A large crowd of workmen looked on as a JCB full-slew attempted to propel the cherrypicker out of its rut by whacking its engine pod using a two cubic metre bucket.  It looked like something from Robot Wars – except there was no sign of a glamorous TV frontwoman wearing leather trousers – and although the excavator eventually won, I’m glad I didn’t have to take the cherrypicker back to the hire shop.


Channel Tunnel TBM

Tunnel Boring Machines or “TBM’s” are another good example of Homo Faber versus world.  A typical shield boring machine, as built by James Howden in Glasgow, may weigh 500 tons, cost £10 million, and can drive a tunnel six metres in diameter at a speed of two revolutions per minute.  The TBM is large and complex, leaving the factory on a train of oversize low-loaders, and taking months to erect in its new underground habitat.  Disaster followed in the case of the Storebaelt tunnel in Denmark a few years ago.  One full year after work began and with only minor progress made, water from the seabed found its way through the TBM head which had been left open by mechanics.  Both 300 metre long tunnel drives were instantly flooded, and the two TBM’s seriously damaged.  They needed a complete rebuild.  The high stakes conform to Virilio’s risk thesis.

Ground conditions have a habit of thwarting us repeatedly.  On another site I attended, a hydraulic excavator scraped away the overburden and began shifting the rock underlying it.  The machine worked all morning, its boom sweeping around balletically, its counterweights sliding like part of a pinball machine.  Soon, men were driving timber profiles shaped like a hangman’s gibbet into the soil.  Then with a loud squeal, an NCK piledriver crawled onto the site, looking rather reptilian.  It moved hard against the rock face, slewed its driving gear into position – then there was a flash of light, and a resounding CRACK!  It turned out there was a high voltage cable in the path of the steel pile: it was wrapped in black tarry stuff like elephant hide, which melted in the flashover.  Thankfully, the driver of the piledriver was saved by his rubber-soled boots.


An unlucky horsebox

The drowned TBM, stranded lorry and zapped piledriver prove that we’re surrounded by entropy.  What we casually dismiss as Murphy’s Law is actually a sign of the fundamental lawlessness of Nature, because the universe is always trying to return to its basis state.  In response, we have to improvise using machines.  Yet entropic chaos has been used by artists, musicians and even architects, such as Lucien Kroll or Elemer Zalotay.  It may seem perverse to consciously design something to appear random, and the result may be a little contrived, like the so-called random number generator on your calculator. 

Yet there is an honesty in the approach of anyone who admits to chaos, rather than forcing order on reluctant materials and as Paul Virilio suggests, we have a morbid fascination with disaster.  If we spot a lorry stuck in a bog, our sympathy for the hapless driver is mixed with a little derision, a sense of the futility of Man’s actions, and perhaps the fecklessness of building contractors.

Rescue is a practical way to deal with trucks which are stuck; Kroll’s aleatoric design method is an intellectual approach to rationalise the seeming randomness of the world and its forces, but there are countless pitfalls to consider, plus some we may not even be aware of (pace Donald Rumsfeld’s rhetoric about “known unknowns and unknown unknowns”).  Instead, we can learn from another American.  Hungry Joe in Joseph Heller’s novel “Catch-22” collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order, so that he could quickly put his finger on the one he most wanted to worry about.

We are in a similar fix, except that there are many more things on a building site which could go wrong...

I usually write articles, and review books, whilst I’m travelling on trains. Often I scribble in the journal I’ve kept, on and off, over the years since I left architecture school. That’s particularly useful to record an interesting conversation with a stranger, or as an impression strikes you. So to see in the New Year of 2012 (five weeks late … the hangover of a spontaneous trip to Yorkshire, freelance work with raw files, and a squatter of old mills, carried itself through Burns Night into February) here are some anecdotes picked up sur la route.

I - Summer 2005
For a spell in 2005, I travelled up and down the meandering railway from Aberdeen to Inverness each week, working on a project to refurbish a biotechnology firm’s laboratories. It’s true that things subtly change the further north you go, and my eyes were opened by how they do business in the Highlands. The journeys were also thought-provoking, in as much as I had plenty of time to think as the elderly Sprinter train trundled through a landscape of fields slowly enough that you could wave “hello” to the sheep as you passed.

One particular day, with a site pre-start meeting to attend, I boareded in Aberdeen and sat down opposite an older chap who told me he had served a couple of decades on the rigs, and whose time offshore was coming to a close. He was affable enough, and once he established what I did for a living, he expressed an interest in using his savings to buy cranes to hire out to construction firms. Although the memory of the man has begun to fade, the conversation sticks in my mind. 

With the certainty of someone who has convinced himself that all businesses work the same way, he told me all about the beast of an NCK Eiger crawler crane which he would hire out on a tremendous day rate to steel erectors, who were presently extending Inverness upwards. I mentioned that there were already several firms hiring out mobile cranes to contractors, and in fact one in Inverness itself called Weldex with a large fleet of giant crawlers who may well have cornered the market in construction hire.

At that he eyed me a little suspiciously, decided that I didn’t have an entrepreneurial spirit, then changed the subject onto how slowly the train was travelling through the sheep-filled fields. His impression was correct in one sense – over the next couple of years, my reading told me that trouble was coming to the construction industry, because property prices were too high (houses at an all-time high multiple of salaries) and the canny Scottish investment trusts like Alliance and Personal Asset, were already holding more cash.  Now wasn’t the time to spend your life savings on a crane so large it needed three low loaders to move it around between conjectural building sites.

Thoughts of crane haulage fell away during a pre-start meeting where it transpired (to no-one’s surprise but my own) that everyone else knew everyone else, had worked with each other many times, and that circumvented the need for an agenda, rules of engagement or perhaps even the pre-start meeting itself. The return journey was just as interesting: a couple of young lads embarked in Elgin, and set down a carrier bag on the table. At least one had come ashore off a fishing boat in Lossiemouth, and he set to work on the bag’s contents – a bottle of cola and a companion volume of Jack Daniels. 

He measured it out generously, one for his pal, one for himself, then held a plastic cup out towards me. I told him thanks anyway and shook my head.  Despite his penchant for sour malt, he wasn’t a fisherman in the heroic Hemingway mould, but rather a character from Cannery Row. He shucked off his battered leather jacket, rubbed his hand over his arms, eyes and crew cut, then described in vivid detail how run-down the boat he sailed on was. By the time we reached Aberdeen both bottles were empty, and the fisherman looked decidedly derelict, too.

II - Spring 2006
The sun flashed over the wet sand at Lunan Bay, then a few moments later the train slowed for the viaduct over the South Esk, and the train clickety-clacked into the station at Montrose. The tide was out, and the exposed mudflats were pungent. My fellow travellers during that time of terrorism, pandemics and avian influenza were concerned: did contagious wildfowl fly in from Turkey, and did they land in the Montrose Basin, like Violet Jacob’s wild geese decades before?

H5N1 was in the news every day, and each morning I saw Glaxo’s pharmacologists on the train. They surely came from Central Casting – one balding egghead please, with overbearing opinions; plus one mad professor with a fluting voice and ZZ Top beard. Certainly, we have some model release forms right here. Thanks man, they fit the bill. Glaxo had recently been given a Government contract to develop a vaccine against the H5N1 strain, so I assume that was what these two were working on; certainly the big complex near the town’s harbour was slated for closure until GSK won that contract, now it was booming again.

Egg rode a touring bike with giant saddle bags; the Prof rode one of those comical Moulton bikes with little wheels, like Reyner Banham used. They may have known little about it, but could not escape from the tentacles of the construction industry: they talked about the new buildings erected on Cobden Street to house new production processes, and knowingly tapped out messages on the keyboards of their cheap black plastic Thinkpads. Were these secret formulae, DNA strings – or perhaps grumbles about programme delays caused by a shortage of specialist vaccine plant contractors…

I’ll never know, because some time later, Egg and Prof stopped getting that train: perhaps they were laid off when H5N1 became an unfounded scare, rather than a pandemic. Shortly before, it had seemed that it was spreading globally and mankind would succumb, apart perhaps from two pharmacologists who would pedal off into the sunset, with a goose stuffed under each arm.

I wonder what Glaxo are doing with their shiny new buildings now?

III - Autumn 2006
The slab boy, John Byrne, probably travelled undetected by most other passengers – but for several weeks late in 2006, I noticed a tall man with a close resemblance travelling northwards. The train horn honked like a sick goose, then it pulled out of the station: the sun glinted off the metal-sculpted eiders frozen in flight at Montrose on departure. Half an hour on, that same sun illuminated the filth on Aberdeen’s streets.  It may offend native Aberdonians, but the route from the railway station up to the city’s main street is desperate – a strip club, the Triads’ takeaway, a porn monger, and a pavement spattered with vomit after the weekend’s excesses.

By way of contrast, John Patrick Byrne cut an impressive figure – the hawkish profile, the salt-and-pepper moustache, the long legs taking long strides. He wore a green hacking jacket, jeans, Chelsea boots. He had a khaki piece bag slung over his shoulder, and a rollie-up pressed to his lip, once freed from the fag restrictions of train and station. All the while he was the observer rather than observed, perhaps jotting his thoughts into a notebook en route to the stage door.

He went striding up the stinking ravine of Bridge Street in Aberdeen each morning, but we diverged once we came to the top of Bridge Street: he carried on along Union Terrace, past the big bronze of Burns with his hairpiece of seagull shit, towards His Majesty’s. The pieces clicked into place: a production of “Tutti Frutti” was being staged at the theatre, and because Byrne lived at Newport-on-Tay at that time, he had to travel northwards for rehearsals. 

I headed up Union Street, past the run-down charity shops and empty units, wondering what Byrne made of the dirty streets of his destination, against the douce avenues of Newport – often described as Dundee’s Rive Gauche.  A few months later, work began on rebuilding the area around Aberdeen station. Dripping, rusting girder trusses – boiler-plated iron, marked with stalactites of lime and calcite streaming from the stonework; rubbish piled on the broken areas behind the platforms; crazed glass in the pedestrian bridges above the Inverness line.

IV - Winter 2010
Changed days, travelling southwards through the Howe of Fife and beyond. The longest rail journey I’ve made in this country – having traversed Germany on an ICE train a couple of years before – led me from Dundee down to Bristol. The train crossed from east to west, taking the line Carstairs line through unpopulated border country then Carlisle, Oxenholme and Preston. By then, I’d changed onto a Voyager, and my backside was numb, tired of sitting no matter how comfortable the seat. 

We won brief glimpses of canal in the winter sun on the way into Birmingham and its grim cavern at New Street.  Two long hours later, Bristol Temple Meads was a revelation: but not in a positive way. You disembark at Brunel’s grand western terminus and within a couple of minutes, you pass the gaunt, burnt-out shell of the Parcelforce building. Inner city dereliction on this scale, and abandonments which have stayed abandoned this long, seem to be a rarity now in Scotland, but Bristol has its own ecosystem. 

That was reinforced when we came through an underpass where a homeless man was pushing a shopping trolley with all his possessions inside it. It’s a scene familiar from documentaries on the Bronx in the 1970’s, but it was jarring in today’s supposedly Big Society Britain.

Yet … half a mile away is a grand Georgian square, a regenerated harbour front with upmarket shops, and the Arnolfini Gallery. Beyond that lies a monster shopping centre, Cabot Circus, which cost a nine figure sum to build. Head a mile in the opposite direction, though, and a derelict old chocolate factory sits rotting, and streets climb up the hill behind it lined with squats and terraces of peeling stucco, rainbow-painted VW Microbuses pulled into the kerb. The site of an old furniture factory had become a self-builders’ enclave, with all the crazy variety of an urban Findhorn. 

You soon realise this is perhaps the least egalitarian city of all, aside from the Great Wen of London, and that society’s extremes flourish in a cheek-by-jowl way you don’t generally see further north. Bristol is chastening because during my three days there, I gained the impression that the architects, lawyers, environmental charities and so forth who inhabit the docklands are the real ghetto-dwellers, and their efforts haven’t made a real difference to anyone’s lives but their own.

The purpose of travel, they say, is to open your own mind as much as to learn more about the world. It is whatever you take from it… in this case a broadened and lowered perspective of this country… perhaps the last years of Britain, before the country itself regenerates.  The motive is the same as the reason why I take photos of human landscapes.

Speaking of which, the next post will hopefully be a photo essay about one of Scotland’s great old names, and its ultimate fate.

Can you hear them, gnashing and wailing again that the barbarians are at the gate?  TV and print journalists are uneasy about the rise of the net, and with good reason.  Fifteen years ago, only Steve Jobs, Alvin Toffler and William Gibson guessed that old media would roll over and be replaced by a world-wide web of computers.  It’s taken a couple of decades for the rest of us to catch up. Mind you, the Mancunian prophet Mark E. Smith had its consequences figured out in 1993, on his album “The Infotainment Scan”…

Andrew Marr’s recent attack on internet commentators betrays his unease, which manifested itself in a criticism of so-called weblogs and “bloggers” – as being “socially inadequate, pimpled, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men” – and the so-called citizen journalism as “the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.”  Bloggers: an ugly term, but one which has stuck.  Aside from the hypocrisy of Andrew Marr criticising anyone for their appearance (after all, did he get his break on TV thanks to his matinée idol looks … ?) he appears to miss the point.  Writing on the internet sprang up both to embrace an opportunity, and to fill a void.  That there is good and bad on the web is a given; as on television, as in life generally.

The point is that in an era of Rupert Murdoch, whose tentacles extend far beyond the wildest dreams of Beaverbrook or William Randolph Hearst, we lack a broad spectrum of commentary on politics.  Where are the strong dissenting voices – nationalist, ecological, far right, far left, fundamentalist – in the centrist British media?  The context is similar to the arrival of music fanzines in the 1980’s – the advent of cheap xerox machines allowed fans to “do it for themselves” by publishing their own little magazines about the music they liked – music which was often ignored by the mainstream press.  Some of the writing in fanzines wasn’t worth reading, but quite a few writers, editors and illustrators later graduated to the glossy magazines or “inkies” (music papers like the late lamented Melody Maker or Sounds).  The new outlet for music criticism allowed good, bad and ugly to reach the public.  Architecture is similarly under-reported, though for different reasons.

Peter Kelly, writing in this month’s issue of Blueprint, is more objective than Andrew Marr.  He specifically laments the lack of critical writing on architecture on the net.  That’s writing with the rigour of formal criticism (writing about ideas) rather than writing which criticises, per se.  Of course, the Blueprint article is only following the lead of Martin Pawley, whose collection of journalism (published post-humously) was called “The Strange Death of Architectural Criticism”.  So architectural criticism has been given the last rites more than once.

Kelly puts forward print magazines as the champions of architectural criticism, in the same way that Andrew Marr feels broadcast media are the natural home of political commentary.  Architecture magazines certainly did carry pieces of in-depth analytical criticism once – well-argued articles that set out to prove or disprove an idea; that challenged what architects said in the face of what they built; that provoked through polemical writing.  When Architectural Review (AR) and Zodiac were at the zenith of their powers during the 1950’s and 1960’s, ideas were their currency.  What happened to that healthy climate of criticism is a relevant question.

Building Design (BD) prints one piece of analysis per issue, if you’re lucky, and it rarely reviews books about ideas.  Architect’s Journal (AJ) concentrates mainly on building studies and technical pieces; Icon is in thrall to the cult of the Big Name, and in the case of Architectural Design (AD) that extends to the Big Name Guest Editor.  Blueprint itself, and AR, try to balance icons with ideas; as does Urban Realm.  Perhaps all these magazines struggle because architectural culture is increasingly visual, in that books, magazines and websites emphasise photos and CGI renders.  Writing is often little more than an extended caption, or valedictory message by a friend of the designer.   These days, there are few manifesto writers in architecture.

It’s a pity Kelly chooses the “Bad British Architecture” blog to illustrate his thesis – because that blog certainly is writing which criticises, per se.  Ironically, it’s apparently written by a former editor of the AJ called Kieran Long – proving that print and web media do meet somewhere – but its invective, aimed at easy targets, only proves that crap buildings are being designed (we knew that already) and also that he has a bias against Scottish architects, particularly Archial and Keppie.  You can't take anyone seriously as a journalist when their considered opinion is, "Dundee has loads of shit new architecture in it".

Another Kelly example, Geoff Manaugh’s BLDGBLOG never set out to provide criticism, rather it’s a cabinet of futuristic curiosities which occasionally picks up on serious writing like Michael Cook’s musings on the power and water infrastructure under our cities.  Equally, though, it’s a platform for Manaugh to get a book publishing deal, although ironically the published book-of-the-website reads like several thematic issues of a magazine bound into one, again proving the bonds between old and new media.  Neither of those blogs proves Peter Kelly's point, because neither attempts to give us architectural criticism; more telling would be blogs which fail to deliver what they promise.

In truth, the terrain is slipping under the feet of traditional journalists: the book and magazine “model” of someone commissioning a feature, a writer producing it, then an editor challenging it, has a competitor.  The net allows an article to be published immediately (rather than waiting for several weeks inside in a computer, then in a RIP attached to a Heidelberg press, then on a pallet inside a distribution lorry, then finally on John Menzies’ shelf…)  The readers can challenge the article’s ideas instantly – an editor may do the writer’s career more good in the long run, but a readership which interacts will do the article’s thesis more good, thanks to the instant call and response of the internet.  By the time readers respond through the letters page of a magazine, weeks have passed and the debate has moved on.  Perhaps that interaction is more important than a writer giving birth to a perfectly-formed article once a month.

Another truth is that the print media are slowly dying – those 1980’s fanzines presaged the closure of all the music “inkies” bar the NME – and when both Icon and BD went from free circulation to paid-for, we realised their light was dying, too.  Larger printer’s bills, smaller advert and subscription revenues bred a vicious circle, where circulation drops as costs go up and content quality declines.  In an effort to stem this, extended pieces of criticism appear to have been ditched from many titles, in favour of courting the “stars” and showing high-impact pics of their icons.  Perhaps the architecture magazines themselves are to blame for the death of criticism, rather than Andrew Marr’s bald, pimply bloggers.

Long long ago, before architecture took up my time, I dabbled in book dealing, buying and selling on a small scale.  In the mid-90’s, before the internet caught on, you relied on books to find other books.  Various firms published guides to bookshops and bookdealers, locating them and providing a rough idea of their stock.  Dog-eared copies of Skoob, Sheppard’s and Drif rumbled around the boot of my car, alongside old banana boxes packed with architecture and design books of various stripes.

If you needed an entertaining but unreliable Cicerone, you picked up Drif.  Occasionally, you come across the kind of book you know will cause trouble: Drif’s Guide to and For the Secondhand Bookshops of Britain was described by one reviewer, the joyless Simon Heffer, as “a scabrous collection of insults, jokes, prejudices and abuses about bookshops and their owners.”  The fact that it was self-published was the key to its existence: a publisher would never release a title which offended so many folk, or a book which revelled in anti-promotion.  Speaking of bookshops, Drif noted – “They are dreadful, you are wasting your money buying this guide.  It will only tell you how dreadful they are in more detail.”  Only someone who loved books as much as Drif could say that.

No-one knew his first name.  His given name was always Drif.  The books were called Drif Field Guides, suggesting that bookshops could be tracked down and ticked off in the field like rare birds, or wild flowers.  The first edition was published in 1984 – In Quest of the Perfect Book: The Antiquarian Bookshop Catalogue & Directory, and its author was already honing his no-holds-barred vitriolic skills.  Mr Driffield achieved notoriety thanks to his Guide.   It is – provided you can find a copy – probably the least objective book you are every likely to read.  Drif badly needed an editor, and the D.I.Y. cut-and-paste graphics improved only a little with each edition.  There are occasional insights into the machinery of the second-hand booktrade, which would be hard-won if you had to figure them all out for yourself: the guides discuss the shibboleths of pricing (calibration, as Drif calls it), condition, haggling, and accurate description.  Yet these are not instructional books for greenhorns; they are as much aimed at the trade as the casual reader. 

Drif characterised his fellow dealers using an enormous stock of pejoratives, including the immortal put-down, “a person who thinks sex is what the Scots carry coal in”.  By turns he is scathing and nostalgic, yet his guides are always shot through with dry wit and variable grammar.   As the years went on, the format of the books changed, and they became more autobiographical – for instance, he recounted his adventures on trains – British Frail – with evident glee.   On one visit to Scotland, he detrained several miles from his destination, retrieved his bike from the guard’s van, then cycled into town.  He turned up just as the bookshop opened, wearing his habitual Aran sweater and tweed plus fours, then parked his transport against the shopfront.   That famous bike featured on one of the book covers, and became his trademark, almost as much as his personal style – a suedehead haircut and bovver boots on one hand, and three-piece suit in green tweed on the other.

Drif marched purposefully into the shop and straight up to the desk – dealers are never tentative when they enter bookshops, unlike casual browsers, who open and close the door gingerly –  then he asked dolefully, “Do you have anything about DEATH?”   Whether or not he had a client who was keen to acquire books about mortality, this opening shot was designed to throw the unsuspecting bookshop owner.   Tales like this gave Drif a disconcerting quality which fed his reputation for eccentricity and bloody-mindedness.   He could be an absolute scourge: albeit the Tyneside dealer who Drif named “the rudest in Britain” found that business boomed after that recommendation.

Scotland fared better, perhaps because Drif enjoyed feeling he was abroad, and he returned time and again with optimism.  From his 1992 book – “Aberdeen is such a different city to anywhere else in Britain; the books are not too great, but it does contain hope.  Hope is the one quality that a secondhand bookshop cannot do without.  It is more important than the actual books.  What you need to visit a bookshop is the belief that there is a possibility that the bookshop may have what you are looking for.  That is why it is that all unvisited bookshops are so tempting; you have not been disappointed by them yet.”

Aberdeen got off lightly, considering that he characterised Glasgow as Gotham City with leprosy; that it smelt like catfood diluted with vintage urine, and sounded like Billy Graham being sodomised.  In fact, he had a weakness for the Far North simply because cheap books were to be had – “bargains known.”  The serious point of the guides was to document all of the secondhand bookshops in Britain, pass comment on them, and perhaps recommend a few where bargains could be had, or where a speciality lay.  As part of his dealing activities, he travelled the length of the country several times a year, so he spoke from experience – and the six editions of the Guide, from 1984 to 1995, chronicled the slow decline of the bookshop.

In 1991, he recounted the story of how he roused the owner of Winrams Bookshop in Rosemount at 10pm on a Sunday evening, and got her to open up the shop for him there and then.  As a non-driver, he was accompanied on that buying trip by a former Israeli tank commander (or so he would have us believe), who drove him through Aberdeen’s streets at 60mph for a couple of hours before they spotted the shop.  This chauffeur – always referred to as Raymond Carver – acted as his Greek chorus throughout the book, “What a toad, have you noticed how he is always keenest on middle-aged females?”  Or the “League of Lady Booksellers”, as Drif fondly referred to them.  By the fourth edition, Drif had mastered the form of the Guidebook and was playing around with Post-modernism.

How the story was told was just as important as the narrative, and that had long ago overtaken the substantive content of the guides.  Drif’s usual style was to employ failed poets as drivers – although the exception was Iain Sinclair who has published several novels about London, and wrote Drif into the first, White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, as a disgruntled fixture of the book trade.  Sinclair noted that as Drif began to believe his own hype, the guides became more anecdotal – which inevitably with Drif means autobiographical – until he came to the notice of the media.  He appeared on Radio 4, discussing the death of the bookshop; later, his manuscript for a novel (described by Sinclair as “strange and driven”) came close to being published.  Although Drif believed the media was interested because he was an example of the Great British Eccentric – he always characterised himself as an outsider – in fact he was an insider, deep in the London booktrade.

One example of that carefully-cultivated eccentricity was the reason why he showed up at Winrams late in the evening – his vegetarian diet.  En route to Aberdeen, he stopped in Perth and attempted in several places to find a “veggie menu” – but only managed to get something to eat when he found a chip shop and ordered “everything vegetarian” from the menu.  Thus he feasted on baked apple, followed by mushy peas with battered mushrooms and onion rings, with a banana fritter as dessert…  Yet read past these amusing asides, and over the course of six books you can see Drif’s heart slowly being broken as the book trade atrophied, destroying the certainties of three decades of dealing.

Drif attributed the decline in bookshops’ quality to the fecklessness of their owners: the decline in bookshop numbers was due, he believed, to the rise of bookfairs, charity shops and the internet.  All three are beneficial for bookhunters, since you don’t need to rely on expensive “booksearch” services (in fact, all they did was to put small wanted ad’s into Bookdealer magazine, and wait for their colleagues to report back with any copies they might have).  Today, you can cut out the middleman, so the arrival of the internet was bad news for Drif.  His main occupation – operating as an arbitrageur in the book trade, spotting bargain first editions in one shop, then punting them elsewhere at a higher price – no longer makes you a living.

He also believed that most bookshop proprietors do not treat book dealing as a business, more as a hobby with cachet.  He was therefore dismayed, but not unsurprised, that the tally of shops run by professional dealers reduced each time he published a new edition of his guide.  He went to war, metaphorically, on the “bookfairies” – dealers who only showed stock at bookfairs, but had no shops; and also the legions of charity shops which have sprung up in the last twenty years.  In fact, Aberdeen was the winner of Drif’s contest in 1995 to find the British town with the most charity shops.  Drif particularly disliked one shop in Rosemount Viaduct – “Oxfam’s Worst Bookshop: you can hear the dogs barking from the railway station” – dogs in this case being books considered unsaleable by the trade.  

The internet helped to kill Drif’s Guides, just as it has helped to kill bookshops.  By offering easy access to all the world’s books, the net has deprived us of the joy of browsing.  Amazon is great if you know exactly what you’re looking for, but hopeless if you enjoy accidentally coming across books whose existence you knew nothing about.  Similarly, the net is full of “bloggers” who voice their opinions about things, without having established their credentials first.  The kind of person who “reviews” bookshops online falls into either of Drif’s first two categories of people who visit bookshops – a Reader or Collector, but never a Dealer.  R and C are amateurs, but it takes a D to provide true insight.  Fifteen years ago, Drif saw what was happening to the trade, and now both Aberdeen and Dundee only have a couple of bookshops.  Even a decade ago, the former had Winram’s in Rosemount; King’s Quair, and the Old Clock Repair Shop in King Street; Bon Accord Books, and the Old Aberdeen Bookshop in Spital, and the Adelphi Bookshop, all selling secondhand stock; plus Bissets in Schoolhill, Dillons, and Waterstones in Union Street, selling new books.  Similarly, ten years ago there was a shop in Perth specialising in secondhand architecture books – today no-one in Scotland fulfils that role.

After publishing the 1995 edition, Drif went AWOL.  One report had him moving to Poland and going native; another dealer I spoke to believed he had gone to ground in North London, and was now fixing computers for a living in Crouch End.  That struck me as strange, considering how he enjoyed being a Luddite, taking the train rather than learning to drive, and calling in favours in order to get someone to type the Guide for him…

Touchingly, the introduction to the 1995 Guide ends with a lament about how transient our place in history is, yet – “It will be through a book that I will survive.”   That is as good an epigram, or perhaps epitaph, as you’ll ever read.

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

So wrote Saul Leiter, one of the pioneers of “fine art” colour photography.

Nowadays we have a huge visual appetite. While there was always a sneaking suspicion that some architects designed buildings primarily for the way they looked, rather than the way they worked, this has gradually developed into architects designing buildings which photograph well.

Saul Leiter wasn’t the first to use colour photography; in the 1940’s, it was possible to buy Kodachrome transparency film in many different sizes, including 35mm, 120 roll film, and even 5x4 sheet film, which Kodak stopped selling decades before they eventually gave up on Kodachrome. During the early years of World War Two, the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information organised photographers such as Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott to drive around rural America capturing the effects of the Depression on America’s rural population, and the country’s mobilisation for war.

The colour transparencies are particularly vivid because they reveal a world which until then had only been viewed in black-and-white. The images subsequently formed an exhibition and a book called “Bound for Glory”, and it’s been argued that they mark the historic divide between the monochrome pre-modern world, and the brilliant hues of the present.

Nevertheless, that was seen as purely documentary photography, and it took a long time for colour to be accepted in other areas such as nature, landscape and topographical photography. Saul Leiter was one of the first fine art photographers to use colour, primarily shooting big cities on the eastern seaboard of America in the 1950’s and 60’s, followed by Stephen Shore and Richard Misrach in the 1970’s with their views of Main Street and abandoned townships. In Britain, the publication of Paul Graham’s photobook, “A1 The Great North Road” became a landmark.

By contrast, press photographers and advertising men were much quicker to see the potential of colour, when four-colour litho printing became affordable in the mass media. One milestone was the birth of the colour supplement in Sunday newspapers in the late 1960’s, and John Bulmer became famous for mastering colour transparency film, by all accounts often slightly underexposing Kodachrome 25 to make the colours deeper and more saturated.

Yet for architectural photographers working in the 1960’s, such as Henk Snoek, John Donat and Eric de Maré, black and white was still the only type of photography to be taken seriously, often shot at high resolution on a rising-front camera such as the 5x4 inch “large format” Arca Swiss or Linhof Technika, which took forever to set up. For speed, they might shoot 120 medium format roll film using a Hasselblad. There are probably many reasons for this, but colour was felt to be fugitive, it distracted the eye from the tones which describe the building’s form, and colour was for the advertising man rather than the serious artist.

By the early 1980’s, Agfa, Fuji and Kodak had produced colour emulsions good enough for everyone to rely on, but the recent death of Kodachrome transparency film – once popular for its warm, fairly saturated colours – underlines not only the onslaught of digital photography, but also the progress of ever-more vivid emulsions such as Fuji’s Velvia and Fortia positive films, and Agfa’s Ultra colour negative film. Over the past couple of decades, the colours in our world appear to have become more and more vibrant, thanks to these films. For the past 25 years or so, Photoshop has enabled the saturation and contrast of firstly digital scans, then digital photos, to be ramped up even further.

Chromophiles can create unreal, super-saturated images which sing when they portray the neons of Times Square in New York, or the Ginza district of Tokyo – but lack fidelity when trying to capture the subtle light and muted colours of Scotland on a wet, autumn evening. The soft, watery, diffuse light you find at times in Scotland means that our environment lacks strong contrast, but makes up for that in tonal range.

Yet photographers believe that there is a style that sells. Practices feel the same. What were once sober “record pictures” are now glossy P.R. shots designed to shout loudly, through dramatic lighting, high contrast and boosted saturation. To publicity-hungry architects, being ignored is not a privilege: being ignored is the ultimate disaster. We’re all in competition, so you’d better eat fast otherwise someone else will clear your plate.

Rather like fashion models have a “good side”, and fashion photographers used soft lighting and flattering print film to reveal it, some buildings offer a “good angle”, which is often shot at dawn when the light is golden. It’s been said that James Stirling’s post modernism – typified by the Staatsgallerie in Stuttgart – is a retinal architecture, with bright dayglow colours conceived for colour reproduction in magazines. From then on, architecture was envisaged in Technicolor.

As a result, the style that sells is a cliché style which the majority of architecture magazines adhere to. Buildings sit under Mediterranean skies; there are usually dusk shots relying on artificial lighting in the buildings to create drama; outside and in, and both streets and building interiors have been emptied of people.

However, attempts have been made before to portray a different reality. John Donat tried to apply the “reportage” photography approach to architectural subjects. The results were the Architectural Review’s “Manplan” issues in 1969 and 1970, which posited a humanist view of how we portray buildings, as well as how we design them. Manplan paid less attention to formal tectonics and concentrated instead on how people experience and use buildings.

Donat’s contemporary John Szarkowski also felt that photographers should abandon large-format photography and use smaller cameras such as the 35mm SLR, coupled with the new fast monochrome films developed in 1960’s, which made it easier to capture the movement of people. As a result, Manplan presented a series of grainy 35mm film photos, and the buildings became a backdrop for the Theatre of the World.

An architectural photographer once told me that smaller formats, like 120 or 35mm were useless for serious architectural photography, as they lacked resolution. Fine, I like a challenge, although when the lab scans 35mm film at 18MB (around 3000 pixels across) I can barely see grain on “pro” transparency film, and likewise with 120 film at 80MB (around 5000 pixels across). I’m well aware of the race for pixels amongst digital camera buyers – but I think the format snobbery stemmed from a certain froideur toward lesser photographers who didn’t use 5x4 technical cameras.

Hobby photographers regard those expensive large format 5x4 beasts, and their digital successors such as the Phase One and Leaf medium format digital backs, with awe. Yet any camera is just a light-tight box with glass on the front, and a gadget which controls the amount of light that strikes the film or sensor behind it. Equipment is just a means to an end, and arguably technique should be invisible too.

You really don’t need to know which camera, which lens, which settings were used: you can enjoy the privilege of ignoring all that. The only thing that counts is that the person who took the photo was there at the crucial time; yet the amateur still believes a better camera will make him a better photographer; rather than practice, application, and dedication.

On my travels around the internet, I came across some exchanges on a Drum & Bass forum where there were dozens of threads about “photography”. In fact, they were actually threads about upgrading your camera. "I just bought a new camera," boasted one, “and for a bargain price on Ebay”. The replies he received included, “I just got a buttered slice of toast, missed out on the Lurpack but got some St Ivel instead. Its spec is: white bread, St Ivel Gold spread, housed on a standard kitchen plate. I'm going to use it to fill a toast-sized hole in my stomach and increase the levels of available carbohydrate in my body.”

And then, “I just got a new light bulb, I missed out on the 40w version but bagged a 60w. Its spec is: 240 volt, pearl white, twist connection.” “Not bad,” replied Mr Toast, “though I would have gone with bayonet connection.”

One architectural photographer I know uses a Phase One back attached to a Sinar front, and shoots tethered to a laptop. However I recently spent a wee while with another photographer, who shoots fashion and ads as well as architecture. He was shooting some images for a feature in Urban Realm using a digital SLR, and whereas his camera cost much less than the Phase One, his technique actually delivered images at a higher resolution and provided a bigger dynamic range.

Plus he could sling the camera around his neck and move rapidly to catch the light, something that was never possible with the Mamiya RZ67 he used before (it was built like an armoured car), far less the Phase One plus Sinar plus laptop combination which the “architectural photographer” uses.

The conclusion I drew is that architectural photographers have many hang-ups, and that perhaps contributes to why they take so many clichéd shots, such as those moody monochromes, huge prints with “edge to edge” sharpness, unpeopled interiors which look the Bomb has just dropped, or the omnipresent glowing glass box at dusk shot.

I learned that there are other ways to photograph buildings.