Houston, we have a Problem

There must be some advantage to spending a few days, little more than a weekend, in Helsinki and then Houston in quick succession, if only for the stark contrast in one's observation of the general human condition in each, and the deterioration of one's own with zillions of air miles. If the Finns are reserved, the Texans are not. For one, I seem to be surrounded by body builders. maybe it's a Charles Atlas convention, everybody called something like 'Billy the Bat'. The women look, at least they did last night, how you say, extrovert, one was litterally dressed up as Snow White. As Dolly Parton said 'you wouldn't believe how much money it costs to look this cheap'. All this from just sitting in the hotel atrium agog on a Friday night for half an hour nursing a Bud light. And thinking of that atrium; the architecture, far from paradise, embodies an infrastructural enthusiasm often passed over by European critics. This is big, brash, stuff, it takes no prisoners, it makes no pretence at manners, it just does startling things, like putting you in a glass lift and shooting  you twenty five storeys up. The architecture is like the tailgating on the Freeway, scary. Then there's the attack minded toilets, if Zizek is minded to divide European toilet design in terms of German idealist, French revolutionary and English empiricist, I wonder what he'd make of the one in my hotel room here, which appears to dispose of my shit almost before I've had it.

On Critics

I will have to explain to my students next week that I am prejudiced against Frank Lloyd Wright. I'm not proud of it, I just am. It can't be just for his behaviour, although his was more outlandish and self obsessed than most, because I tend to enjoy the outlandish behaviour and self obsession of his contemporaries, indeed most modern architects, who I have come to the conclusion were largely a bunch of sex obsessed alcoholics (if they were any good). I can empathize with these people, I have a voyeuristic temperament, so why not FLW?
Well the buildings are horrible I suppose. My experience of both the Guggenheim New York and Barnsdall House in LA was nothing to write home about. I have to remember, with effort, just how awful the Guggenheim is, and enjoy the fact it's the only art gallery I know of that artists actually got together and complained against. The Barnsdall House was, well, dingy, and the only memorable thing was that the great master insisted his multimillionaire client sleep on a futon. Meanwhile the fact that you can hardly function in the USA as an architect without worshipping FLW puts me off, and of course I exhibit my more classical inclinations when I say he has been responsible for an awful lot of crap.
However this is not the point, because old fashioned prejudice may be OK.
An old colleague of ours, the much esteemed Peter Blundell Jones, was caricatured as thinking right angles were fascist. Whilst clearly not true, the opinion allowed him to function and write the finest of books on the organic strain while hating Mies van de Rohe. Colin Rowe was clearly incorrect throughout most of his essay on La Tourette because he was temporarily indisposed, concentrating on literal and phenomenal transparency, and subsequently unwittingly spawned much inclement architectural misery as a consequence for twenty years. Reyner Banham was once thought hip, now thought not. Even Vincent Scully thought Michael Graves Portland Building might be really good. Even the masters make mistakes (see next months AR).
Hence students who are over reverent of anything anybody has published on a particular topic come over as those who are not quite getting it, who are missing that essential element of empathy with the work in question, or for that matter empathy with the critic in question. Rowe once turned up to a lecture 'looking like an unmade bed', a finer description I cannot imagine, and so I think a few large ones are essential to empathise with him, at least. I once fell out of a taxi before I'd even started a lecture at University of Westminster. I'm not proud of that either, although the students at the time seemed mesmerised when I proceeded to play Motley Crue's 'Girls Girls Girls' about eighteen times.
PS I love this portrait of Colin Rowe (above).

The Barbers Shop

My barbers isn't like a barbers. I realise it likes to think it is, you can't book appointments for instance, and it's relatively cheap and cheery, but if I'm looking for a paradigm (a word I was always trying to understand as a student, because tutors kept going on about changing paradigms) I would say that today my barbers closest paradigm was 'Crufts'. The level of narcissism you will witness in a barbers in Hackney is as horrifying as it is illuminating. It was hard to dislike so many people at once.
Of course everybody is younger than me, and you could say why go in the first place, but my barber does beards, and he pretty much owns mine. I'm trapped.
So I have to sit there for quite a long time, watching Crufts (with a touch of Jack Daniels distillery about it in terms of time spent). There were horrible children weeping over their iPads, there were gentlemen so prepossessed with their looks you could not even imagine a conversation with them. There were some startling beards.
But I sit it out because I recognise a good barbers when I see one, for barbers at best are pretty OCD. Mine's on plenty of medication I'm sure, he's made a very wise career choice. He snips away with great care and attention all day long, until he gets distracted of course, when you'll be left for dead, but I don't care, I just have to schedule in several hours like ladies do, just for his beard.

Alvar Aalto on Frank Lloyd Wright

‘But it isn’t built on rock. My research indicates that Taliesen is built on cunt, and you really feel that foundation here. It’s a good foundation.’

Keen perception here from Aalto, quoted in Schildt's biography (see post below).

Strippers C4

Stereotypes? Of course, we get the avaricious black girl, the youthful innocent from the bad side of town and the jaded dancer trapped in the dance, but we also have the good minister down the street, and best of all a bunch of Scottish piss-pots who see a few hours in Baby Dolls as an opportunity to savour a semi so they can ball a fat girl later. I wonder if anybody is ever going to make a TV programme on the subject that doesn't confirm every stereotype in the book. All I was looking forward to was a dancer with a 'heart of gold' and Jon Bon Jovi to walk through the door and whisk her off her feet.
Of course the good thing and Channel 4's 'Strippers' on Tuesday nights is it confirms the stereotype that TV is stereotypical, that it is incredibly difficult to do or say anything that is actually interesting, ie: confirms that dancers might wear ordinary clothes for interviews (rather than their underwear) or hold interesting opinions or post doctorates. This one helps us behind the mask of TV, not behind the world of a titty bar. It's purpose is to be as titillating as the idea of a strip club.
Many interesting people other than me (world changing theoretical physicist Richard Feynman and world changing art critic Dave Hickey come to mind as having hung out perpetually in such establishments) do it and I don't think we do it to garner storming erections and threaten the general populace. Personally I know it's time to visit The White Horse in Shoreditch when I find myself muttering 'fucking wanker' when I walk past some unsuspecting stranger in the street and hope they haven't heard me. It's because I'm pissed off. That's when I know it's time to escape to a land where girls take off their clothes as if they enjoy it, for me, and that I don't have to be in direct communion with them to do it.
Why anybody thinks this behaviour is unusual beggars belief, it's the most normal thing in the world. And personally, I wouldn't mind if we called it sex work, in fact I would like it if people got more interested in defining sex work (because you'd soon realise everybody was doing it) instead of indulging in what is a whole raft of plain prejudice.
Photo: Julie Cook

Jean Claude - His Death

My uncle in Houston has died. All his organs seem to have given up at the same time. Sometimes that happens, it feels right. 'Quelle vie!' as he would say, 'Merde!' He was more French than French, but once admitted to us, very late at night, that actually, being from Alsace, there was a family cloud of collaboration with the Germans, not that we could make much sense of it at the time, since he was off on one. Jean Claude escaped to Houston doing computing mathematics for those Mad Men he was very much part of. Drank like a fish did uncle Jean.
He married my beautiful aunt Bridget after she had stepped out of Melton Mowbray and in to tinsel town USA the year I was born, 1961. Me and my brother always got the best Christmas presents.

My Dad, who's over ninety, showed his wisdom below today remembering:

'a big pool of memories which range from the highly amusing to the pathetic. The more interesting and diverse the character the more intense appears the loss and ones omissions. I suppose that is how we ought to feel at these times if the relationship has meaning. Jean was a great character, difficult at times, loving at others. Argumentative yet smooth.'

Jean Claude was certainly charismatic, sometimes childish, sometimes way overboard, but since I heard of his death yesterday, the world has seemed rather flat. 

Alvar Aalto - His Life

Returning from Finland I have continued my researches in to the life of Aalto, courtesy of Goran Schildt's excellent, diligent and above all thick biography which I picked up at the Aalto House. And what a life it is. Kicking off with four vermouths for lunch (that, by this time, was just openers) with the old man, then deciding NOT to concentrate on the more personable aspects of Aalto's career, Schildt provides a fabulous picture of, in particular, life in the late twenties/early thirties, where the Soviet Union was 'an architects paradise' and it was the thing to look like an engineer, fly in aeroplanes, dance to jazz, visit porn cinemas during CIAM and wife swap with similarly minded young radicals (this at a time when radicalism was synonymous with 'great beauty', 'breeding' and so on). It makes staring at the computer screen look terribly boring. Along the way I find the the hero of Finnish design was more likely to speak Swedish, that Aino Aalto, his wife, was 'deeper' and of course that Aalto's reputation gathers pace almost as it's all over, that we are in the last quarter of the book by the time we get to Saynatsalo, and that most engagingly Aalto once missed a award ceremony in Paris honouring himself entirely because he had strayed in to the bar.

Excellent stuff. Highly recommended.