Ten Years After

Looking back ten years we see the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock, RBS and so on, and the exposure of the crooked means to artificial wealth that wasn't really supposed to happen. The banks were bailed out because otherwise the whole system would crumble (which means, technically, it still could).
We tend to move on from day to day without realising the cause and effect that follows through after such events; we're stupid, we hope for the best, we're a 'virus in shoes'. We forget, and we get clogged in the present.
Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and George Bush the President back then, and we might smile. But there followed ten years of 'depression'. Personally, we have suffered this less than millions of others. But not now.
Who would have put on a bet we would now have Theresa May as Prime Minister and Donald Trump as President? That we would have voted to leave the EU? That we would have experienced the disastrous consequences of yet more wars we do not understand, that we would have the concept of 'fake news' almost legitimated? Or that we would have machines predict our speech patterns in communication, or social media platforms that predict and influence our choices to the point of determining them? Are these things related? There appears chaos but there is underlying, rampaging, order. The Loch Ness monster might pop up in front of our balcony, or a Church of Ra erupt opposite the Cash Converters, but I guarantee there will be more, and more obvious, heroin addicts lining up for their just-in-time delivery tomorrow just across the street: that business might as well become a legitimate franchise.
I owe (much of) the content above to John Lanchester, whose essay at the front of the latest LRB arrived today. What's funny, if you can call it funny, is that I now longer suffer observations like his at a distance. The veil may have risen slowly, but I no longer look from a position of privilege at some strange world happening somewhere else. Last night both Julie and I celebrated (with considerable vigour) our own potential severance from institutions that have supported, or perhaps 'been' our lives for in my case 27 years, in hers a little less. Why? Because the situations we thought we worked in have transformed in that decade in to those we absolutely do not want to work in; because not only instead of presidents do we have fake businessmen, but instead of vice chancellors of universities, we have fake businessmen.
The digital world is probably killing knowledge itself, because knowledge might kill your ability to make money, or operate 'successfully' as a pariah in the late capitalist world. This is the new dark Ages; this is fucking terrible; this is the assassination of the intelligent in the name of 'business'. This is the end of the enlightenment, the end of reason, the end of virtue. So this really is the end of times; this is no joke.
I sat in a hot room yesterday being quizzed as part of course validation. The conversation, such as it was, was almost totally orientated around issues of branding and box ticking; on our place in the market and our mission for the future and the level of our conformity to 'standards'. Now if I were selling cars, I might say my Jaguars were 'sporty saloons', I might understand the mystique of 'British quality' that gives them 'value' (even if the company is owned by Tata). It's harder to do this with people; I would hate to 'define' my student body other than to compliment its individuality.
Meanwhile, we used to have a rather valid place in the market, that is before they decided to put it on the market! Then, suddenly, we couldn't fit in; we could only become the Bash Street Kids at the bottom of the table, our maverick status was inconceivable within hands-on management devoted to hands-on management. To be the Bash Street Kids of architecture was unacceptable no matter how appealing it might sound to the marketplace! Draw your own conclusions there.
So we have to conform. It's a form of tyranny. It is also the means by which we will fail, for others to gobble up the spoils. But I reckon the more universities act like corporations, the more they cease to be universities.
And as for that 'mission' for the future, I have long revered Keith Richards remark: 'to keep breathing'. (Plus, of course, to keep doing what he loves doing, and no matter what he endured with junk, I give a nod to the no doubt highly dubiuous aristos who kept him alive.)
So I sat in that room amidst a quagmire of fake status (rather than honest qualities) and I sank. I was disgusted.

Authoritarian Regimes

People think that authoritarian regimes are based on ideas. That's not true. Authoritarian regimes are based on group based paranoia; who's is in, who's out, who's on the bus who isn't. It doesn't matter where the bus is going (usually 'to hell'). And it doesn't matter if you are a rock band or a political party, the principle of closed rather than openness is what sustains the regime.
Meanwhile, when you are on the outside of a regime, life can get very uncomfortable, so you might create your own counter regime. Both are probably as bad as each other.
Perhaps as a consequence, authoritarian regimes can base themselves on very stupid ideas (so the quality of idea hardly matters) but that is not the core mechanism for the authoritarian regime to work. The core mechanism is the implementation of power.
The enemy can be, often is, invisible. To the Nazi, the threat wasn't an actual Jewish person of a particular consciousness, but a notional section of the population to be blamed. Blaming people (but not real people) when things get tough is happening quite a lot these days; there is the notion that if we excluded certain people, things would be better - when actually, they would be incomparably worse.
There was a handy saying that anybody who wanted to run an institution should never be allowed to do so. Oscar Wilde famously declared 'I won't belong to a club that accepts me as a member'. Such a view is, I suspect, correct, and all clubs, presently, are fending off, and part of, the overwhelming opportunity that 'freedom to know' might provide; that the internet might have provided if it hadn't been co-opted in to the service of consumerism and surveillance; a tragedy that could have been foreseen, should be fought against, and may yet be undone. The phenomenon is now totally evident in our universities, where professors are not there for what they might profess, but to 'manage'; or rather to stabilise, or prop up, a system that is (potentially) wildly anachronistic.
At last night's 'Free Range' (A collection of the country's photographic schools, all doing their end of year thing on Brick Lane, East London) the overwhelming sense was one of exhaustion; that there was nowhere for photography to go anymore. The pieces above, by Jake Gill, were neat, really neat, but the blub was, once more, 'mental health'. Surely people should realise this 'mental health' as a construction, and what's more a nasty consequence, of a horrible way to run the world.
We will have the same sense at every end of year architecture show. That is until there is a fundamental shift in the 'means of production'; towards joy. (Joy would seem a reasonable, all encompassing, alternative where presently there lies 'exhaustion'.)
Authoritarian regimes become stronger the more they are threatened. Today, the clubs are more threatened than ever, and they become more intense as a consequence. When the RIBA can no longer legitimately function as a passive organ of polite society, it flogs itself off as a 'brand' of deep consequence, which it isn't, and never has been; it mortgages itself to a dying system.
Stupid people join authoritarian regimes. Don't be a stupid person.

The Polish School of Architecture 1942-45

The Polish School of Architecture joined that of Liverpool University between 1942-45. The harrowing times experienced by Polish emigres may be acknowledged in the skies in the Battle of Britain, as well as in other military and other services at the time, but I came across a compendium of Polish students design work when attending the school hidden deep in a second hand book store in Abergavenny, and what a read, if you like reading drawings that is, it is. You are transported to another world.
The book, published by Liverpool University Press at nearly 250 pages in 1945 is a time capsule, and represents an effort altogether different than you will find up on the walls of architectural schools today. The bacon factory, above, is especially captivating. Whilst I have seen rather wilful urban pig farms in recent years, spinning yards of narrative in an atmosphere resembling total doom, here is one cheerfully holding, slaughtering, bleeding, dissecting, cleaning and confecting the polish sausage no doubt sadly missed by it's author in drawings absolutely matter of fact, and how refreshing that is. I suppose when our image of a bacon factory is polarised simply in to Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on the one hand and an ginormous anonymous shed in Denmark on the other, that's what attracts. Here is how it is done, in a process organised and for all to see in a modern building by a potential architect who is heading right back to Poland to build such a thing any minute now. And along side him in the studio were his friends all imagining (and also collected in this volume) other bacon factories, jam factories, newspaper headquarters, hospitals and so on all in the same optimistic vain, with not a hint of irony or distress. Meanwhile they were all dragooned into drawing fabulous plans and sections of historic Polish architecture; vernacular, secular and religious before they could set about their bacon factories, and that almost makes you cry.
Of course I wonder what happened to this third year student, he may have suffered reservations as to return at the close of the war, but what a book. A bacon factory; you wouldn't even set that project today, whilst a jam factory, in the midst of bloody carnage, would be seen as macabrely ironic.