small ritual

conran was boring

what the conran exhibition at the design musuem reveals is that conran is really rather conservative and a bit boring. he is often written up as the man who brought modern design to the british mass market - but the exhibition suggests that the strongest thread in his work is nostalgia. the bedrock of habitat from the start was country cottage victoriana and mediterranean rusticity - homely tradition with less ornament, old-fashioned teapots and tin mugs, wicker and stripped pine. even the modernism was nostalgic - the breuer chairs were a 20s-30s revival in synch with biba. the exhibition has a section for conran's 1990s-2000s restaurant career - each restaurant represented by a chair and a place setting. with one exception these all reference the late 19th-early 20th centuries, moderne and art deco - nostalgic again.

of course this was shrewd retailing - the mixture was perfect for baby-boom suburbanites just back from a greek holiday, sitting in their stripped pine kitchen dreaming of the good life. the first habitat shop also sold some braun products, which now seems strange because they represent a much more rigorous and technological modernity.

conran's breakthrough was in packaging - the whole look for your home in one place, down to the small details, room sets and the catalogue to show you how to put it together, piled high and flatpacked to take away. what ikea would do cheaper 20 years later [and kill habitat]. much of it was expensive, but there were plenty of cheap[ish] pieces which would turn up in everybody's home [a 'noguchi' lampshade, a chicken brick, a teapot]. by such osmosis the british were introduced to the duvet - maybe conran's biggest achievement is in changing how the british sleep. it's fair to say that half of the stuff in the catalogues was plain and rather dull, which represented conran's idea of simple good taste but doesn't have the wow factor that leads to revivals.

sic transit

on wednesday our other local nuclear power station at oldbury was shut down after 45 years. while berkeley, which closed in 1989, was industrial, oldbury was a showpiece with visitor centre and nice shiny reactor faces, and famously featured in doctor who.

and in december 2012 filton airfield - home of bristol aircraft, and after them concorde - will close.

and so you might say the 60s, local version, will finally pass into history. we are due a new nuclear power station close to oldbury, and BAe, Airbus and Rolls Royce engines will continue to build in Filton, but two very conspicuous physical landmarks of an era will go [apart from the oldbury reactor cores, which will be with us until 2109 at least].

meanwhile, nimbyish opposition is reported to proposals for wind farms, and new housing on the airfield, which would have been welcomed as signs of progress and prosperity 40 years ago. many of the nimbys no doubt came here, in their youth, because of nuclear power, aerospace and new housing estates.

another world was possible

those of you who follow my flickr feed will be well aware of my fascination with 1960s and 70s modernist design. partly this is a recovery of influences which i now realise were formative, such as apollo-era space books, or these two books which formed the bedrock of my architectural consciousness when i had them from the library as a teenager.

there is also a fascination of otherness. i can't travel into the future to sample its strangeness and difference, but i can go to the past. i begin to see why the elderly get lost in their memories - it's weird back there. the additional twist of the 60s and 70s is that they expected a different future, so in contemplating them we are also contemplating how things could have turned out differently for our own present day.

which introduces my third motivation. i find myself looking at these pasts in terms of alternative visions for us, now. things we didn't do that we should have done, and perhaps could yet do. i find the unbuilt scheme for hook new town particularly poignant, because it exists for a society unlike the one we actually inhabit - it exists for a society which is mostly about public goods. the form of the town quite literally embodies this, as it is largely determined and built by the public sector. private interests are told where and what they should build, and are not allowed to override the long-term public good made manifest in the master plan and megastructure.

at a personal level, the architecture of hook assumes that we will behave in a neighbourly fashion, not vandalising and mugging just because there are blind corners, not playing loud music or throwing trash from balconies. it assumes that we will accept limits on our use of cars, in favour of walking [the town is intentionally compact] or public transport. in fact the high density and strict masterplan are safeguarding ecological public goods, and also ones to do with public health [eg more time spent walking, less time spent commuting], which would be lost if development were allowed to sprawl or provide two-car garages.

the design of british rail asks us similar questions. do we want an integrated transport system run for public good, even if that means that it's heavily subsidised out of our taxes? should design be about legibility and clarity rather than branding and advertising? should it be helping you through a system, or trying to sell you things? it's sadly ironic that the british rail corporate identity was being taken as an example in denmark, of all places, at the very moment that it began to be dismantled in britain.

which comes back to gladwell's point, that there are those who want the whole world to be a marketplace for their own benefit, and the rest of us who play along at least some of the time in hope of a share in the proceeds. when public goods are eroded, always ask: who makes money out of this?

public goods

this talk by malcolm gladwell on the subject of public goods, via saga arpino. wish i'd seen it a year ago, but now is good.

public goods are the things we have to buy or make happen collectively, as distinct from private goods which are the things we buy or achieve as individuals. gladwell's point is that we overvalue private goods and undervalue, or even actively undermine, the public goods. this is partly an ideological bias in a society like the united states - but it's also a matter of personal greed, because public goods tend to require that you pay your taxes and forego immediate personal gratifications for the sake of the wider good and the longer term.

public goods require that you see yourself as a stakeholder in a society. one of the problems we face is that the very rich have no commitment to the place[s] in which they happen to live and make money - all they ask is that it doesn't interfere with their own freedom to enrich themselves. or they will take themselves, and their money, elsewhere, in a way that was not generally feasible even 30 years ago.

cut out the light

was at the coolest private view tonight at the scin gallery in old street. downstairs noma bar made cutout illustrations on a huge press, using wooden dies, and scribbled with his iphone torch on photoluminescent versions of the prints. upstairs jake dyson talked about his wonderfully engineered lighting products. also lots of strange and beautiful materials for buildings.

the horizontal arm of dyson's CSYS lamp is a heat sink that cools the LEDs, using the same technology that cools the chips in computers. the very efficient cooling extends the life of the LEDs to almost 40 years. the power consumption is 8.8W. the arm moves horizontally and vertically on a very smooth counterweighted mechanism. the lamp is fascinating in a way that's hard to photograph - you have to touch it and move it.

stop making sense

so, postmodernism exhibition. the first thing to say is that i am over-familiar with the subject matter and exhibition contents, having been an architecture student through the height of it in the late 70s and early 80s. in fact i could mount a miniature version of the show from my own possessions. it starts with a large architecture section, which undoubtedly touches all the bases in a comprehensive way, but this is the hardest part for me since it is all the stuff i know too well and have rejected.

i would have liked to see more blade runner and more early 80s japanese fashion - comme des garcons and yamamoto had a huge impact with clothes that seemed to violate western notions of tailoring and fine fabrics. the one comme outfit in the exhibition brought back pleasant memories of wearing mass-market rip-offs of that look - oversized black wool and cotton. i still like.

studio alchymia and memphis probably made the best artefacts of the period. memphis especially retains an optimism and strangeness, partly because it had deep roots in the 60s which are not made clear enough here. the stuff influenced-by is more disturbing - showing how this quickly became a meaningless luxury style for the new rich. there is a large section of these luxury objects [of course we're in the v&a], but the thing that would be good just here is the movie 'wall street', wherein we see the characters surrounded by pomo architecture and possessions - the setting for "greed is good". again, it isn't made clear enough *why* postmodernism was so easily co-opted by neo-liberalism.

being so familiar with the period, i can't help noticing what's missing. there isn't enough explanation of context at the beginning, before we are dumped into postmodern architecture. too little is said about the crisis of modernism in the late 60s, and the varying motivations of the first postmodernists in rejecting it and seeking new directions. little is said about the philosophical and societal underpinnings, semiotics and deconstruction, the effects of consumerism and the media - all the things that loosened the presumed ties between form and function, style and meaning. the exhibition shows us what, but isn't clear enough about why.

even within each section, there is not enough storyline - more a scattergun survey, entertaining but frustrating. postmodernism was highly referential, so what came from where and in what order matters. it would have been a good idea to provide a list of references on the label for each object.

the beginning also needs more pop-cultural pzazz, some sweeteners to get the punters into it. roxy music and biba, say, to introduce themes of historical revivalism and identity [self]construction. neither roxy nor biba appear here - no pop and fashion from before the 80s, so missing some key parts of the story.

so, worth a look, but i feel like i should make a supplementary set of notes for anyone i know who goes, to make better sense of it. a metanarrative, if you like ;)

ten years

while i think of it, smallritual.org was ten years old this month.

nothing lasts forever

i wore the timberland shoes mentioned in cycle of fashion for about a week, and suddenly the sole fell off one of them. i took a step and the rubber tread of the shoe was left behind on the carpet. this was in a client's office at canary wharf, so i hastily stuffed the detached part in my bag hoping no-one had noticed and limped back to my own office. fortunately i had a pair of trainers under my desk.

on inspection the other shoe was beginning to split too. probably the glue between leather sole [the sewn part] and rubber tread had dried out during the years in storage, and flexing the shoe in wear had caused it to delaminate.

today i took the shoes into the timberland store in regent street. i was after advice for a repair, but they offered me free replacement - which is pretty good 15 years after purchase. i was sad to give up the old pair after so many years in the wardrobe, but a shoe is for wearing.

health and safety

in light of the current events at st pauls cathedral, beyond's 'unsafe space' event at greenbelt this year looks highly topical. especially these billboards of quotes from jesus:

antiVJ

since posting that flying lotus clip my vimeo viewing stats have gone ballistic - over 1000 views in three days and counting. the maker of the visuals contacted me for a credit which i am only too happy to give - check out her stuff on vimeo, and the antiVJ site.