Harry's Bar Helsinki

Please nobody ever spoil this one. The copper covered column is familiar to fans of Alvar Aalto (and generally used outside- see post below) but this is a thoroughly vernacular version.

Snowflakes in Snowflakes

This was Aalto University this last Wednesday, and this was a great way to see it, a crunchy carpet of crisp snow beneath your boots, wrapped up in your 'Crombie' with a big smile behind your scarf. What a great complex; it was time to look again at what Aalto actually does. I say does because it still matters to me. This is not an architecture with a narrative, not an architecture of fairy stories. You find yourself looking strictly at composition; at how he racks and stacks, how he layers horizontally, how he bookends, and how he manages to break out with lecture theatres and libraries suddenly filled with light and exuberance. And it's all brought together with such finesse, a language of detailing perfected over time and applied according to the situation; you can tell a Beethoven symphony if you have the ears, you can tell an Aalto building if you have the eyes (whatever the present enthusiasm for The Eyes of the Skin). And all this done from that small studio with a handful of trusted assistants wielding pencils!

Julie and I had joined a university field trip for the day, a bunch of nineteen year olds with nineteen year old enthusiasms, which is basically being glued to Whatsapp and Facebook. I had already feared the worst for our future passing through Heathrow. 'Robots, robots, robots' I wrote. The whole place appeared suddenly a prototypical corporate prison to be rolled out across the universe, where if you didn't shop virtually continuously, you were a threat to society, and everybody was noodling crap on their phone.

Even an eighty-seven year old George Soros has noted this as a threat to society. I doubt my sense of this threat is quite the same as his, but all this instantaneous twittering, so addictive to youth (and so levelling; nobody can step out of line- they face instant ostracisation) really makes me wonder (or rather sent me, repetitively to Harry's Bar on Liisankatu, where the old men still read their newspapers in the quiet, while they still can). That ability to concentrate, to actually look at a building (or for that matter the calm interior of Harry's Bar) and appreciate a hierarchy, is what is so compromised with this technology, and it is also when the future becomes just 'robots, robots, robots'.

Teresa/Theresa

Actually I think Theresa might quite like to look like Teresa once in a while. And this is 'to Adam', that original sinner.

This is Me

Sometimes blogs seem rather anonymous, so here's at least a picture of me at home. I bought the Bibendum chair sometime late last night on eBay. I've wanted one for a long time, looking for ages, and then that moment happens; 'vintage, London, and buy now for £175' within twelve hours I'm sitting in it. That accounts for the smile. Sometimes things work out. Bloody good chair the Bibendum.

Le Corbusier the Fascist.

I often hear that Le Corbusier was a fascist, and my best answer to this cry from the audience so far is 'of course he was'. Between the wars it was possible, actually quite usual, to imagine a world benevolently run for the benefit of mankind at large, and this was an inherent quality within European modernism, and certainly Le Corbusier believed in this to the core of his being. Of course, later, this would be considered 'utopian'. Dreams of a better tomorrow are always deemed 'utopian' when they don't work out. Those presently championing a new technological tomorrow might do well to be wary here, for if you do not change the mode of production in the face of great technological change, you will likely get slavery, and your dreams, in turn, will be considered 'utopian'. The modern movement might have imagined changing the mode of production, and Le Corbusier imagined this, but it didn't happen, and look where we are now.

Communism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism all conform to the notion of organisation at the heart of that new tomorrow, and provide the messy bit that is political implementation. When somebody announces that Le Corbusier was a fascist, we might remember that as far as I know he could never have been a Nazi. 'Blood and Soil' and all that nonsense was certainly not for him, even if he skirted around the Vichy government in such pathetic manner as to be deemed a whisker from collaboration during WW2. I think he would have worked for anybody in the hope of realising his dream; remember 'architecture or revolution'!

And of course he did work for the soviets, even if they found him rather hard to handle, and he quickly understood, by introducing his project for the Palace of the Soviets under a funeral shroud whilst a double bass played jazz, that it wasn't going to work out. In the end Le Corbusier needed enlightened clients who believed in him, and that exactly what we see at Marseille, in Firminy and in the surprise appearance of the dominicans from the wings post WW2.

Aside from the detail, the call that L-C was a 'fascist' means something else since we began to use the term against anybody who might favour suppression of the individual in favour of the collective. This gets us in to very difficult territory indeed, because is L-C's provision of 'a little bit of order in all this chaos' necessarily suppression of individual expression? One could argue, for instance, that the housing product created under neoliberalism is infinitely worse for people in general than the models proposed by L-C and other progressive modernists.

Meanwhile, those who were actually card carrying Nazis; Martin Heidegger and Albert Speer find themselves many apologists these days. I wonder if that is a coincidence.

Learning From St Albans

As far as I know St Albans has a population of at least 14,000 people, but as an English country town, indeed, Heart of England (St Albans still has more pubs per person than anywhere else) it doesn't have a butchers shop. It might have Costco (and the rest). It may boast more cars per person than anywhere else, but if you walk around the centre of St Albans, nomatter how much your image of England depends on the fierce resistance of Captain Mainwaring and Lance Corporal Jones, that glint in the eye of English independence; there is no place to buy a sausage in the actual town centre.

In fact, on my last visit, the line that came to mind to more accurately describe the youth of St Albans was:

 'Mortally offended snowflakes stare in to their selfie lattes dreaming of cockerpoos'.

And I came up with a lot worse when it came to the guys in the pubs, and their wives with their induction hobs.

So thinking architecturally, if you want to see where (to paraphrase Venturi Scott Brown Izenour) main street has gone all wrong, it's St Albans for you.

And if you thought (from my previous post) that I am at all positive about late capitalist development, think again.

The Holiday Jigsaw

Jigsaws are very therapeutic, this one was like building a house in the wilds by proxy, and at this time of year you might want to imagine just that. Jigsaws might be corny but they are always good to do, even when you discover a few pieces missing. This one needed a little detournement (a horrible word in English but no doubt quite lovely in French). No prizes for recognising the anti-Heideggarian thesis here.