Posts Tagged Books
Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life by Susie Harries – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 6, 2011
A towering account of the German-born scholar who chronicled England's most significant buildings is no more than he deserves
"It takes earnestness to make a man and diligence to make a genius," Pevsner noted at 20, and he had plenty of both. He'd started writing historical dramas at seven, and a diary begun in his teens recorded the lifelong anxieties and emotional insecurities that tend to come with precocity of this order.
A Protestant convert, like many of his kind in the early 20th century (his father was a prosperous Russian-Jewish fur trader), he developed an intense patriotism, and in his case quasi-spiritual convictions about the Germanness of German art. For Pevsner, a kind of instinctual, apolitical socialist, national feeling was coupled with a sense of social responsibility, and dislike of the unhealthy values he saw in Weimar Germany.
So it was that in its early days National Socialism held no terrors for him, and he was slow to perceive the devilry of the Nazi creed.
Only when threatened with dismissal from his academic post did he join the flood of émigrés to England, though even then he was still sending his children on German holidays on the brink of war in 1939, and in touch with leading pro-Nazi art historians. His apparent obtuseness, Harries suggests in subtly analytical pages on his supposed fascistic inclinations, was due less to wilful blindness than to a lifelong political innocence and reluctance to cut ties with his homeland.
England proved a shock and, in social terms, a puzzle. Like Soviet Jewish pianists or violinists in Israel in later years, art historical refugees from Hitler were two a penny, and Pevsner endured years of penury and humble work, including as an adviser on household design ("the more art is applied to an article the worse its appearance becomes"), before his ascent to panjandrum status ("Is it in Pevsner?"), and eventual knighthood.
His success came not by social contacts – on the contrary, he was accused of having too few aristocratic acquaintances and of omitting grand country houses from his work for leftwing reasons – but by the manic diligence he was to show in the 23 years it took to compile the 46 volumes of The Buildings of England. He was most at home in churches, which he would root about tirelessly, "capital by bloody capital", though not entirely for spiritual reasons: "Really, the uses some people put these places to," he was heard to say when a service in progress obliged him to wait.
Culture clashes with the locals are entertainingly documented. In England art history was often an amateur affair, carried on with nonchalance, effortless superiority and class pretension, a place where folk such as John Betjeman (a modestly born social alpinist aware that his own name was of German origin) smirked about "Herr Doktor Professor", and where the very term Kunstforschung – art research – was thought frightfully amusing. "It was partly banter," Pevsner noted, "but not all banter." He was getting to understand the English.
Impressed nonetheless by innovative forms of popularising the arts in museums and lectures, under pressure from the BBC and others, he did his best to lighten the tone of his talks and articles, without succumbing to the personalised approach he found tiresome. Gradually his style, accent and all, found an audience, and numerous outlets, the Reith lectures included.
The feuds that assailed him, chiefly about his early book Pioneers of the Modern Movement, were one-sided affairs, in which he rarely hit back. Gropius was always his hero, which brought suspicions of continental theorising, inhuman functionalism and dangerous doctrines about the moral responsibilities of artists. He had definite, though unpredictable tastes, hating both brutalism and the flamboyant art deco of the Hoover building, and preferring more humdrum, workaday modern styles.
At the same time he involved himself in conservation battles, as postwar reconstruction, then 60s insouciance, conspired to obliterate outstanding Victorian buildings, and pulling down Covent Garden was seriously considered.
In the Nazi years it was better to be dépaysé abroad than in your own country, yet despite his English successes all his professional life you sense in Pevsner a certain homesickness. For us at least the conflict of national intellectual styles he represented was hugely beneficial. The irony of a "Prussian pedant" lecturing the English on Englishness, for which he was mocked, resolves itself in the fact that, together with Gombrich in art history and Weidenfeld in publishing, Pevsner was one of a golden generation of German/Austrian Jewish refugees who did much to give their adopted country the bottom it prided itself on already possessing.
Harries guides us through treacherous territory, of race, class, politics and artistic and intellectual intrigue, in a sure-footed manner. There is empathy with her subject, who had a kindly side (a "benign spider" someone called him), but her judgments are balanced by a cool and compendious intelligence, together with rare explanatory powers.
Intellectual movements, art politics, wartime history, a great man's unsteady emotional life – there is too much in this 800-page book even to evoke here. It is long because it is rich with things to tell and to say. A perfect blend of events, ideas and personal narrative, it is a masterpiece of the biographical genre 20 years in the making. As with much of Pevsner himself, no one, you feel, could have done it better.
Maurice Craig obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 2, 2011
The architectural historian Maurice Craig has died aged 91 in Dublin, the city towards whose conservation he dedicated much of his energy. During the late 1950s, Maurice defended the Georgian architectural legacy of the city against barbaric development plans which would have destroyed the memory of "colonial Dublin" some 40 years after independence. Maurice successfully alerted public opinion to oppose the plans. We first met at one of the meetings for the campaign.
Born in Belfast and brought up as a Prebysterian, Maurice went to Cambridge University, where he occupied the same room at Magdalene College once used by the politician Charles Stewart Parnell. He continued his studies at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed his doctorate on the poet Walter Savage Landor.
From 1952 to 1970, he was an inspector of ancient buildings at the Ministry of Works in London, specialising in the protection of British monuments which had survived the war. Always appreciative of traditional skills that were being lost, Maurice enjoyed model-making, in which he demonstrated his admiration for the engineering of old steamships. He also took delight in his handbuilt French limousine, a vintage Delage.
His publications included Dublin 1660-1860: The Shaping of a City and a study of mausoleums. Another consuming interest was decorative Irish bookbinding, and he published the standard history on the subject in 1954. His most personal book was The Elephant and the Polish Question, whose incongruous title reflected the diversity of subjects, from literature to cats, within its pages.
A hospitable man with strong beliefs, Maurice married three times. He is survived by his children, Catherine and Michael, and stepchildren, Sean, Mark and Antonia.
Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David E Coke and Alan Borg – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 2, 2011
London's famed pleasure gardens, now lost to history, provided a fascinating clash between high and low art, noble and vulgar pleasures
If you go to the site of Vauxhall Gardens now, you will find a ragged patch of grass near to a demonic concatenation of bad architecture and violent traffic engineering. All trace of the gardens' purpose – pleasure – has vanished. Mentioned in Pepys, Fielding, Keats and Thackeray, and many other writers, the gardens now seem a myth, a figment, little more than an evocative name for something that seemingly was never there.
Yet the gardens very much were there, remarkably, from 1661 to 1859: how many other places of entertainment, subject to fluctuations in taste and fragile finances, last two centuries? Its success was despite the fact that this open-air place was exposed to the weather, and for most of its life was reached by a precarious boat ride from central London. And despite, too, the legendary expense of its food and the money-saving, extra-thin slicing of its meat. It even survived the attempt of Jonathan Tyers, its forceful proprietor from 1729 to 1767, to make it a place of morally improving entertainment, which might be thought a suicidal business proposition.
David Coke and Alan Borg have written a weighty, scholarly book that gives substance and detail to this chimera. If feels as if every possible detail and document relating to the gardens have been scanned and assimilated. The result is the most complete reconstruction of this vital place there is likely to be.
What emerges is an alter ego of London, essential to the city but apart from it, a magical-tawdry place of appearances, shadows, sensuality, transience, tolerance and other things suppressed by the hard forms of the city proper. Historically, it stood between the aristocratic gardens of the European Renaissance, and the music hall and the seaside pier of Victorian mass entertainment, between Tivoli and Blackpool. It offered dining and drinking, music, art and, increasingly as it struggled to fight off competitors near the end of its life, acrobatics, fireworks, wild animals and balloon flights.
It was a social mixer, patronised by the Prince of Wales and aristocrats, but also by writers, artists and ordinary people. One of Tyers's more idealistic aims was to make a place of freedom, a prototype for a more egalitarian future. He also achieved a fusion of high and low art: music by Handel, paintings by Hogarth and Francis Hayman, mixed up with the spirit of the fairground. Music was not heard, as in a concert hall, in silent rows facing the players. It permeated the gardens, forming a background to everything else that was going on.
When the gardens are remembered now, it is often as a place of sex, paid for and otherwise. And so it was, especially in the first decades before Tyers took it on. His campaign of moral improvement did not – unsurprisingly – make the gardens chaste, but it made the prostitution and assignations less blatant, just enough to make it respectable for royalty and families to visit. His gestures of propriety were not so dumb after all – they allowed the gardens' attractions to take many forms.
Fashions could be displayed, patriotic triumphs celebrated, and great music performed at the same time that shady walks and shrubberies allowed ample scope for shagging, or for the Victorian man who delighted in hiding in the bushes so he could hear "hundreds" of women urinating. Possibly, the gardens were no more Bacchanalian than central London: according to Dan Cruickshank's Secret History of Georgian London, most of Fleet Street, the Strand, Covent Garden and St James's Park was in effect an open-air brothel. One secret of the gardens seems to have been their relative subtlety, their tempering of function with fantasy.
The design of the gardens was simple: a rectangle divided by a grid of avenues and paths, with light, playful pavilions in classical, gothic and Chinese styles. There was interplay between the built and the planted, and structures and trees combined to make the spaces needed for the gardens' pleasures. Near the entrance sinuous colonnades contained supper boxes, which like theatre boxes were places for seeing from and being seen. In the centre was a pavilion for musicians. The essential architectural element was light, with artificial lamps to prolong the enjoyment of food and music, and increase the management's financial take, and the equally necessary darkness of the shady walks.
Tyers was a sort of entrepreneurial Prospero, and under his and his heirs' management the gardens had their best decades. The authors of the book are uncertain why they finally declined and fell. Bad weather was blamed at the time, but as the gardens had been there since the 17th century, this is hardly convincing. Coke and Borg cite the growth of the city, which made the gardens less of a rural idyll, and the rise of rival attractions, such as early music halls, and the Crystal Palace, which was relocated to Sydenham from Hyde Park in 1854. There was also more money to be made by building houses on the site (whose streets, after bombing in the second world war, would return to grass). Surprisingly, the authors do not dwell on one reason sometimes given for the gardens' decline, which is that railways made it easy to reach more distant attractions, such as the seaside.
With their methodical style, Coke and Borg do not quite conjure the gaiety of their subject. But at the end of the book are published the only two known photographs of the gardens. They catch your breath. Here is a creation from the age of Samuel Pepys, a thing of legend, captured with a camera. It is like seeing a photograph of a unicorn, or a dodo, or Atlantis.
Jane Jacobs was the seer of the modern city | Ben Rogers
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 19, 2011
Jane Jacobs' classic book on urban living is 50 this year. Our current leaders would do well to read it
Who was the pre-eminent urban thinker of modern times? In his fascinating history of modern urban planning, Cities of Tomorrow, Sir Peter Hall devotes chapters to the likes of Ebenezer Howard (founder of the garden city movement); Patrick Geddes, the champion of self-governing city regions; and the great, utterly disastrous Le Corbusier.
But what of Jane Jacobs, whose most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is 50 years old? Hall accords the book only a few paragraphs – "one of those classic cases of the right message at the right time" – and its birthday is going almost completely unmarked in the UK (apart from an event at the RSA this week). But it must be a lead contender for best and most enduring work on urban planning of the last century. Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Le Corbusier's La Ville radieuse are period pieces. But Jacobs' masterwork still feels relevant.
The story is well known – a classic David and Goliath. Jacobs, a housewife, mother and part-time architectural journalist, had been drawn into the campaign to prevent New York's dictatorial planning boss Robert Moses – who had already ripped up swaths of the city – from driving a highway through her native Greenwich Village. She decided to write a book. But her book did not just dwell, negatively, on the harm New York's car-obsessed, modern-minded planners were doing. Building on close observation of her own and other neighbourhoods, she mounted a thorough and original defence of traditional city forms against both the garden city movement and modernist city planning. She argued that dense, mixed-income mixed-used neighbourhoods, designed around short city blocks with busy amenity-lined streets and small parks, had a huge range of benefits unappreciated by modern urban planners, who mistakenly associated the old city with all the evils of the 19th-century slum.
Of course Jacobs did not get it all right. She exaggerated the importance of urban form in shaping larger social developments – but so do most planners. And she thought urban conservation would always serve the interests of the working class, when too often it has become a middle-class nimbyist cause. As Edward Glaeser argues in his new book Triumph of the City, working-class people have largely been squeezed out of the sort of urban neighbourhoods Jacobs defended, and the middle class who now dominate them are too often allowed to stop developments that might enable poorer people to move back in.
But time and experience has vindicated most of Jacobs' claims. Her arguments that relatively dense, lively city neighbourhoods tend to discourage crime, foster inter-generational and inter-ethnic integration and promote "social capital" have become received wisdom – though it took the police and local authorities a long time to catch up with her and not all of them are there yet. (Jacobs would have hated gated communities and commercially owned "public realm", just as she would have opposed the spread of CCTV. She would have been appalled by the poor quality and mean character of many of the flats that have been built in the last decade.)
While Jacobs did not explicitly make the case for the environmental benefits of density – this was 1961 – it was implicit in what she said. At a time when everyone thought the only way to promote road safety was to separate pedestrians from vehicles, she sensed, rightly, that this would only make roads more dangerous.
But Jacobs was not just the first to articulate these now relatively obvious points. She argued for the indispensable role that cities play in fostering all forms of creativity, innovation and economic development. Here again, she has been vindicated. Though technology has rendered face-to-face contact unnecessary, urban economists like Richard Florida and Glaeser have shown that most economic innovation still takes place in cities. If poor people around the world flood to cities it is because they rightly see that that is were economic opportunity lies.
Indeed there is something almost eerily contemporary about Jacobs' work. Ours is an age increasingly wary of both unregulated markets and large bureaucracies – and increasingly hungry for an alternative. Research continues to underscore the importance of relationships and reciprocity, membership and belonging to our wellbeing.
New Labour's preoccupation with civic renewal and community building, Cameron's "big society", and the "red Tory" and "blue Labour" movements are all responses to this. But Jacobs was there first, and with a hard-headed, modern understanding of the sort of relationships that are needed in modern life, and the sorts of community that contemporary cities can offer. Her belief that urban planners and architects should not be realising visions, but creating and preserving resilient, inclusive and adaptable neighbourhoods – places which can largely look after themselves – still resonates.
Britain's city leaders would do well to read or re-read the Death and Life of Great American Cities in this anniversary year.
Leo Steinberg obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 13, 2011
Art historian and critic known for his elegant investigations of Renaissance paintings
Leo Steinberg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most brilliant and original art historians of his generation. He wrote as persuasively about the great Renaissance masters as he did about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His best-known work was The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).
I was lucky enough to meet Leo in 1955, and over the decades we continued to see each other – in New York, where he lived for most of his adult life, or on his visits to London. He was impatient of small talk or gossip; conversation was always about particular works of art, which he would discuss intensely. What he said was charged with a sense that art was of overwhelming importance: "anything anyone can do, painting does better".
That passionate involvement with a specific work, and the intelligence which fed it, made him not only an engrossing interlocutor but also a dazzling lecturer (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, tickets for his lectures sold out on the day they went on sale). He was invited to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington DC (1982) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1995-96).
He was a devoted teacher, concerned about his students, whose careers he followed. From 1961 to 1975, he was professor of art history at Hunter College, in New York, and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Benjamin Franklin professor until his retirement in 1991.
Though firmly identified with the New York art scene, Leo was born in Moscow, where his father, Isaac, a distinguished lawyer, was briefly Lenin's minister of justice. Isaac's radical views (he wanted to shut down all prisons) soon led to his dismissal and emigration to Berlin after threats of assassination.
Leo's childhood in Berlin left him with a barely noticeable German inflection to the otherwise impeccable English formed in his adolescence, since the arrival of the Nazis forced another displacement – to London. There, he finished his schooling and studied sculpture at the Slade. He moved to New York with his family soon after the end of the second world war.
In New York, he worked as a freelance writer and translator, studied philosophy and taught life drawing at Parsons school of art. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His study of the diminutive and intricate Roman baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini, set out the formal devices employed by the architect to engage the passerby's unsuspecting attention.
While working on his thesis, Leo published criticism in arts magazines and became the most articulate spokesman of the rising New York School of painters. His early advocacy of Rauschenberg and Johns was committed but jargon-free, and he was one of the few critic-historians whose essays were eagerly read by artists for their clarity and elegance. His criticism was collected in a book of essays, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art, in 1972.
But for all this involvement, he was not really acquisitive and lived rather frugally. In 2002, he donated his collection of 3,200 prints (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, but also works by Picasso and Matisse) to the museum of art at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship (known as the "genius" grant).
He continued to be prolific, writing with equal enthusiasm about Pontormo and Picasso. The examination of a work was never approached on merely formal terms – although he was a painstaking analyst, always meticulous in his attention to detail, to the way brushwork was used to fragment or to mould space; he would even investigate the implications of words pasted on the printed scraps of collages (treated as abstract patterns by most art historians) in his search for clues to the artist's intention.
Leo was impatient with any criticism which merely analysed the object presented to the spectator, since what really interested him was why the artist had wanted to do it in the first place. This is the key to The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. The book is concerned with what Leo termed "ostentatio genitalium", the display of the genitals which often figured in devotional paintings or engravings of the Renaissance and which had been "tactfully overlooked for half a millennium". He argued that the prominence of Christ's genitals was a presentation of incarnational theology explicit in the sermons and pious literature of the time, in which the blood shed at the circumcision is considered the first offering of the redemptive sacrifice.
It was the embodying of an idea which historians, oscillating between prudishness and pornography, found embarrassing or far-fetched. The book was received with bemused deference at the time; however, it has recently been reprinted with an account of the controversy and has transformed our understanding of Renaissance art, while his reading was confirmed in an appendix to the book by the Jesuit theologian John O'Malley.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the artists who preoccupied him in his later years; Michelangelo's sculpture of the naked Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, to which the church added a loincloth, was one of the key works discussed in The Sexuality.
His book Michelangelo's Last Paintings, on the frescoes of the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, in the Vatican, appeared in 1975. In 2001, he published Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, a subtle re-examination of the most famous of Renaissance frescoes, in which he pointed to the combining of the forewarning of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist which followed it.
When I visited him last year – we both knew we might not meet again – he dismissed the matter of his health in the first few minutes, but for an hour and a half we talked of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, a circular painting of the holy family, in the Uffizi, Florence. We discussed the affectionate embrace of the figures, and the naked youths who people its background. He was writing an extended essay on the painting and thought that he would leave it unfinished, a fragment.
Leo married Dorothy Seiberling in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, he was much helped by a devoted assistant, Sheila Schwartz. He is survived by his nephews and nieces.
• Zalman Lev ("Leo") Steinberg, art historian, born 9 July 1920; died 13 March 2011
• This article was amended on 13 April 2011. The original stated that Leo Steinberg had also been married to Phoebe Lloyd, and that he was helped by Sheila Schwartz 'in his later years'. These points have been corrected.
St Pancras Station by Simon Bradley – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 8, 2011
By PD Smith
Part of the excellent Wonders of the World series, Bradley's history has been reissued with a new postscript to mark this year's reopening of the former Midland Grand Hotel, "the world's most spectacular Neo-Gothic hotel". Built from 1867-77 by the Midland Railway Company, this imposing edifice of red brick and stone is, writes Bradley, "the grandest single monument of the Gothic Revival in Britain". But St Pancras is really two buildings: George Gilbert Scott's beautiful hotel (which British Railways wanted to demolish in 1966), and the soaring train shed behind: the "greatest of High Victorian secular buildings". Designed by the engineer William Henry Barlow, it was once the tallest and the widest train shed in existence. Ian Nairn described this yawning space as "a vast throbbing hangar" and even today it remains awe-inspiring. The restoration (which cost nearly £1bn) gets the thumbs up from Bradley: it is "a project of the highest quality and intelligence". An authoritative and elegantly written biography of one of London's finest buildings.
CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed by Frédéric Chaubin – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 28, 2011
These images of Soviet architecture from the Brezhnev era are simply out of this world
Soviet brutalism is not something traditionally thought of as beautiful, but Frédéric Chaubin's stunning photographs, published under the facetious title CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, should go some way to changing this.
Fascinated by the massive scale of Brezhnev-era architecture, the French photographer has toured the former Soviet Union since 2003, in search of dramatic examples of these sculptural buildings. The 1970s-1990s was a strong period for Soviet architecture, especially in the peripheral republics, where outlandish designs were an expression of the striving for independence, an early inkling of the break-up of the USSR.
Architects at this time picked up where they left off following the suppression of the avant-garde by Stalin in the early 1930s, and were able to capitalise on advances made in engineering in the interim period, producing buildings with enormous internal spaces and dramatic cantilevered protrusions. These were the final emphatic declarations of the solidity of communism before it cracked up.
Chaubin mostly concentrates on the edges of the former empire: the Baltic states, the Caucasus and central Asia, and particularly on buildings set in wide open landscape, which look like deposits from outer space.
As the title suggests, these ambitious constructions were part of the attempt to keep a competitive edge over America during the space race. Enormous concrete circuses, built in most major Soviet cities from the late 1950s onwards, look like flying saucers, as does the now shabby Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research in Kiev. Even palaces of marriage – register offices – look like the dwellings of Martian princes.
Because the Soviet society for which these buildings were constructed no longer exists, many of them are defunct and abandoned. Sanitoriums once replete with elaborate modernistic glass chandeliers and asymmetrical swimming pools are no longer maintained, due to a lack of funds and, among those who can afford it, a preference for holidaying abroad.
Chaubin has caught these buildings at an interesting time, when many are under threat of being bulldozed to make way for new developments. But equally, a broad public is waking up to their inventiveness and craftsmanship, irrespective of the repressive political state that spawned them. It would have been valuable to have more information about what is happening in these buildings today, but, nevertheless, this book is a bold foray into an architectural period that is barely documented, either in the former Soviet Union or the west.
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda – review
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 28, 2011
Will the urban centres of tomorrow be built around large, busy airports? Rowan Moore does not think so
The old city is no more. The future belongs to places such as New Songdo in South Korea, a wholly new city being built on an artificial island and linked by road bridge to Incheon international airport. And to 500 cities of the same size, as yet unborn, that China needs. And to Memphis, Tennessee, home of Fedex, and the UPS city of Louisville, Kentucky.
These, says Greg Lindsay, showing a suitably 21st-century indifference to the ancient Greek plural of "polis", are "aerotropoli". An aerotropolis is a city with an airport at its centre, rather than its periphery, "a new kind of city, one native to our era of instant gratification – call it the instant age". It is "a new phenomenon… reshaping the way we live and transforming the way we do business". Cities such as London, forever dithering over a third runway at Heathrow, and Los Angeles, where nimbies keep blocking the expansion of LAX, and New York, with sclerotic links from the city to its airports, are in trouble.
Lindsay is a journalist fascinated by air travel. His co-author is John Kasarda, a business school professor with presumably lucrative consultancies telling countries, cities and businesses how to prepare for this new age. Lindsay wrote and did much of the exploration for Aerotropolis; Kasarda supplied much of the wisdom.
The book tells how the world is rearranged by the logic of time, distance and cost. In 1974, for example, the Japanese Airlines executive Akira Okazaki used the spare capacity on cargo flights to fly whole chilled tuna around, leading to the world-wide consumption of sushi, with the result that bluefin tuna is now endangered in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean. When political protests closed Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport, hotels ran out of imported milk and fish, but filled with orchids that could no longer be flown out.
The authors address obvious counter-arguments. They do not accept that electronic communication will reduce demand for flying, instead pointing out that increased communication and increased travel have always gone together. If people make friends through Facebook, they may want to fly to meet up. Amazon stirs up a whirl of airborne goods, and business deals arranged by email need eye-contact and handshakes to be consummated. As for ecological objections, they argue that air transport causes a relatively small proportion of emissions. Roses imported to Britain from Holland, for example, are far more carbon-hungry than those from Kenya, because the hothouses and fertiliser needed to grow them outweigh the savings on fuel costs.
Aerotropolis also describes the kinds of space formed by flight, the concourses and hubs that Douglas Coupland called "an in-between place, a 'nowhere', a technicality… an anti-experience… like what happens to you just after you die and before you get shipped off to wherever you're going… pure neutrality made concrete". The patron saint of such places is George Clooney, as the flying, heartless, corporate assassin in Up in the Air. Walter Kim, author of the book on which the film was based, has contributed a plug for the front cover of Aerotropolis. "Throw out your old atlas," it says. "The new one is here."
I have to say, I have heard much of this before: in Martin Pawley's Terminal Architecture of 1998, in Rem Koolhaas's S,M,L,XL(1995), in Deyan Sudjic's The 100 Mile City (1993), in Marc Augé's Non-Places (1992), in the writings of JG Ballard, even in Alexander Korda's 1936 film of HG Wells's Things to Come. Despite all this historic futurology, there seem to be quite a lot of boring old cities around still doing reasonably well. The really interesting question is why the true aerotropolis, despite compelling reasons for its existence, is taking so long to get off the ground.
The examples cited in the book are not completely convincing, and form an unintentional anti-prospectus for Kasarda's consultancy business. There is the city that was to be built next to Bangkok's airport, with advice from Kasarda, but didn't happen. Reunion, a development close to Denver international airport, "a community specifically created for the pursuit of happiness", ended up with one of the highest foreclosure rates in the region. Wilmington, Ohio, lavishly wooed DHL with public money, only to be dumped when the company's profits went the wrong way. Memphis, despite the blessing of Fedex, "still has a long way to go". There is the growth around Washington's Dulles airport, which owes as much to vast contracts from the Pentagon as to the airport. There is Dubai.
It is hard, yet, to find a true aerotropolis, a thriving, rich city formed around an airport, outside the promotional spiels that promise New Songdo will be "A cool city! A smart city!". Human factors, such as the fear of planes falling on your head, or attachment to a place, or political manoeuvring, or the persistence of non-aeronautic networks, counteract that other human factor, the desire for eye-contact, which seems to drive the immense machinery of air travel.
The less spectacular truth is that cities have always relied on transport, but not on transport alone. Airports are a powerful force among others, and it is the interaction of these forces that makes cities interesting. Aerotropolis is straining too hard to be a smartypants bestseller of the the type produced by Malcolm Gladwell to explore this complexity. It is hectoring, breathless, over-persuading, a boring book with an interesting one struggling to get out. And it undermines itself in the authors' biographical note: Lindsay lives not in Memphis or any other aerotropolis, but in Brooklyn, in the dinosaur city of New York – not, presumably, because of its airports.
Recording revolution: George Orwell v Joan Miró
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 24, 2011
Both responded strongly to Spain's civil war and early fight for democracy. But Orwell was willing to face – and tell – the truth
George Orwell was no great art lover. In Homage to Catalonia, his book on the Spanish civil war, he makes scathing remarks on Barcelona's 'hideous, modernist cathedral' – by which he means Gaudi's Sagrada Família, neither ugly, nor straightforwardly modernist, nor a cathedral. In a famous essay on Salvador Dalí, he portrays modern art as a decadent, amoral, selfish business.
I don't know if he was even aware of Joan Miró, a far more likable modern artist by Orwell's moral criteria, or of his poster Aidez L'Espagne!, which expressed the Catalan painter's passion for the republican cause in Spain. But these two men and their responses to revolution and war in the 20th century make a fruitful comparison at this moment in the 21st.
In 1930s Spain, a democratic republic was trying to sweep away centuries of monarchical and Catholic absolutism. But Spanish democracy came under attack from a nationalist military revolt led by General Franco. Idealism did not defeat guns: Franco went on to win.
Miró, like Picasso, reacted with deep emotion to the plight of Spain. His paintings see the violence of civil war in an old shoe, in the prongs of a fork, in a colossal woman. Like Goya, he probes the horrors of a society tearing itself apart. But Miró and Picasso were not themselves fighting in Spain, and their support for the republican cause was not complicated by any investigation of its failings.
That is why, although the Spanish civil war generated some of the greatest art of the 20th century, if we want the real lowdown on Spain we will always go beyond images to a work of journalism. The more I think about it, the more incredible it seems that Homage to Catalonia got written. Only Orwell could have written it, because no one else was at the same time idealistic enough to join the militias and fight in Spain yet honest enough to anatomise in such ruthless detail the lies and manipulation that let the left cripple itself.
Today, we are all Joan Miró. We express loud and forthright support for democratic revolts across the Middle East. But what next? If it all ends in a democratic utopia without too much bloodshed, we will register our delight. Rightly so. But what if Gaddafi's bloodcurdling words mark a gorier stage in this regional revolution?
At that point, it would not matter how many fine words were spoken in support of fine ideals. Instead the world would – does – need new Orwells, ready to fight for justice but also to face and tell the truth, however uncomfortable. If you have not read Homage to Catalonia, read it. If you have, why not read it again? It is one of the truly essential modern books.
Unthinkable? JK Rowling at Preston bus station | Editorial
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 5, 2011
Preston's bold and uncompromising bus station deserves a high-profile campaign by a famous writer to save it
The novelist Tony Parsons has been spending a week as writer in residence at Heathrow. This will furnish him with a book, and may help to engender a warmth towards the place not always evident now in the departure halls. We might not have today's magnificent St Pancras station had the poet John Betjeman not joined the campaign to save it, and there must be a temptation for those in charge of unloved or threatened places to sign up some equally irresistible writer. One hugely deserving candidate is Preston bus station, which at little more than 40 years old is bold and uncompromising. The great topographer Ian Nairn was as awed by it as he was by the Harris Museum, its cherished Victorian neighbour. The Twentieth Century Society has fought without success for it to be listed. And though this kind of concrete epic often leaves passersby cold, a recent survey made it the city's most loved building, ahead of the Harris. Yet the council wants to sweep it away to make room for a shopping development that's unlikely to say, as the bus station does: "This is Preston, not just some random replica of everywhere else." Were JK Rowling, for instance, to take up her station there, to observe and record its 113s easing out on their evocative journeys through Wrightington Bar and Almond Brook to Pepper Lane, Standish and Wigan, its 280s embarking on their Pennine outings to Clitheroe, Barnoldswick and Skipton, could even the most flinty-hearted of culture secretaries deny its right to survive?
Architecture, Art and design, Books, Comment is free, Editorials, JK Rowling, John Betjeman, The Guardian, UK news
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