Living in an idea

While the internet has its problems (it is slowly drowning the intellectual capacity of the human race in a deluge of cat videos for instance), it can occasionally present you with a moment of epiphany. Perhaps you can find it in a music streaming service, in the feeling you get when you hear that perfect song for the first time and it slots into your brain like you've always known it. Sometimes you can come across the visual equivalent of this sensation, as I did with the artwork of Geebird and Bamby.

Their prints create a dream-like, idealised mid century architectural space, uncluttered by anything as messy as humans. This gives you time to fully appreciate the purity of the designs, architecture that is not afraid to stand on its own and to mean something.

For the purposes of this analysis, I'm pursuing my conviction that mid century architecture is all about living IN an idea, whereas the architecture of today, postmodernism, is about the idea living on top of you, the space forcing you to conform to its version of reality. Perhaps the best example of this is the shopping mall. I'm sure many people have written much more articulate studies than I could of how the shopping mall represents capitalism's attempt to completely dehumanise and homogenise every town in the western world, so I'll try and avoid generalisations and offer an example from personal experience, the mall in my local town of Watford.



This is a fantastic illustration of postmodern architecture planting itself on top of the "real world". It was literally built over the town centre, whole streets being demolished to make way for 727,000 square feet of retail space. Its antiseptic white floors and acres of glass roofs attempt to create an entirely neutral space, not threatening or stimulating in any way, the international semiotic vocabulary that says "this is a shopping mall".



By way of contrast, it's undeniable that the buildings in Geebird and Bamby's prints are functional, but they also engender aesthetic pleasure while employing the absolute minimum of meaningful elements. For instance, in the airport terminal above, the textured brick frontispiece sits as a piece of pure decoration, dynamically extending out from the main building in two dimensions, having the courage to bear no direct relevance to the environment or to semiotically "advertise" it. Can you imagine something like this at a modern airport, which so often conspire to disguise themselves as warehouses? On a side note, the tail fin of a plane protruding over the top of the building is a nice touch - it doesn't give away the identity of the airline or the destination of the flight, echoing the mystery and glamour of travel in the jet age.

I suppose what it really boils down to for me is that, while these are structures that all serve a purpose, they have a bit of fun with it. For instance, while it's a very simple feature, the slanted roof of the diner below makes it stand out against the flat desert background. You're not just eating eggs and bacon here - you're eating eggs and bacon inside an embodiment of the dynamism of an era that was literally and metaphorically reaching for the stars. This was a time when it was perfectly reasonable for a roadside diner to imply "you're going to be the spacemen of tomorrow, and your architecture must reflect that!"

Destroying the world before it was cool

(Illustration by James Wragg, http://thrustingpens.com)

THERE will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild-plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There will come soft rains, Sara Teasdale, 1920


When Teasdale wrote this extraordinarily prescient poem in 1920, the memory of the First World War was still an open wound. People had seen for the first time what the unstoppable progress of technology was leading to - the ability to undo whole landscapes, for civilisations to grind each other to dust. Interestingly though, while most artistic responses to the war reflected on horror, loss and anguish, Teasdale drew a form of positivity from the experience. Inverting the masculine narratives of pride and bombast that had led to the war, she imagined a world that was glad that we had destroyed ourselves, that was breathing a sigh of relief at our absence.

In a slightly incongruous link (its my blog and I'll mash what I want into a post thank you very much), M.P Shiel imagined the post-human future from a very different perspective in his 1901 novel "The purple cloud". Presaging much of what popular audiences would find appealing about nuclear war fiction, Shiel revelled in detailing the aftermath of the apocalypse in brutal detail, deliriously smashing down the edifice of civilisation. His fantastically peculiar novel, infused with a palpable sense of menace, sees the protagonist awaken an ancient, evil force on an expedition to the North pole. Unbeknownst to him, the force he encountered spreads a poisonous cloud across the globe. The cloud moves at walking pace, slow enough to allow people to flee and create a wave of refugees that spread terror before themselves. As he sails back to the inhabited world, he comes across drifting boats full of corpses, and seaside villages inhabited only by the dead. He cannot accept that he is the only man left alive, and begins a desperate search for other survivors.

In the same way that nuclear war awakens irrational fears, the very stuff of nightmares (an unstoppable force that is coming to kill you, the ultimate sanctuary of the home becoming a tomb) so Shiel too taps into primal fears of inescapable death. It's the same thing that makes a theme park ride enjoyable, fear by proxy. Just as you're strapped into the ride, able to experience the adrenaline of fear in the knowledge that you're actually safe, so the reader can experience the thrilling fear of the apocalypse through the lens of the novel.

The narrator deduces that Mineshafts must be the most likely place to find survivors. However, in a reflection of the later common fears about fallout shelters, he soon discovers that "the notion of hiding himself in a mine must have occurred to every man alive", creating horrendous crushes of suffocated crowds. In the same way, fallout shelters became a metaphor for the pointlessness of attempting to plan for a nuclear war - anyone who had built one would surely find themselves quickly under siege from their less prepared neighbours, desperately trying to force entry to their only hope of survival.

The narrator comes across the aftermath of one such attempt at forced entry in a tunnel where the occupiers fought back, finding "three hermetical holes in a plaster wall... [from which projected] the muzzles of three rifles, which must have glutted themselves with slaughter". Faced with such scenes, he gradually loses grip on reality, to the point where he embarks on an epic orgy of destruction, devoting himself to burning the world's great cities to the ground. Here again tropes of nuclear fiction are foreshadowed - nuclear war destroys the present, poisons the future with fallout and erases the past. If London were to be struck by multiple hydrogen bombs, it would not be just the physical city itself that was destroyed, but all the evidence of its history, the monuments, art works, museums and cathedrals. Thousands of years would be undone in seconds.

This is what makes nuclear war a unique form of anti-narrative - only in its most basic sense is it a war between states. It is, amongst many other things, a war against the narratives we tell ourselves of our own importance. Given enough time, rain will erode anything, and there'll be plenty of time...

So its a bit of a lazy post on my part this time, but also a slightly unusual one...



Nuclear weapons have become something more than just physical objects. They are metaphors for the end of the world and for humanity's self destructive tendencies. However, whilst their use en masse could cause the end of the world (or the human race, or just civilisation; because there's never been a nuclear war, no one can predict just how much it would mess things up) it's worth remembering that even in the worst case scenario there would be parts of the world pretty much untouched. Whilst Hollywood would have you believe the world would become uniformly uninhabitable, it seems rather unlikely that any of the major nuclear powers would have missiles programmed to fire at Iceland, or Norway, or most of the Southern hemisphere. (There are currently no nuclear powers in the southern hemisphere, thus no countries there present a threat in this scenario, although South Africa is the only country in history to have developed nuclear weapons and then gotten rid of them).

Even within the target countries, the blasts would not be evenly distributed, as the things worth destroying aren't equally spaced out. Again, it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to nuke Cornwall for instance, and because the prevailing wind in the UK tends to be towards the east, it's very likely that the cornish wouldn't receive much radioactive fallout from surrounding areas, raising the rather charming prospect of a post apocalyptic west-country where everyone goes back to farming the land and sunning themselves on the beach.

On the other hand, major cities and military installations would likely be pummelled with multiple, large yield weapons. The yield of a nuclear weapon is a way to quantify its explosive force, and is measured in its equivalence to tons of TNT explosive. To give a sense of scale, the largest non-nuclear bomb currently available in western arsenals, the American MOAB, contains the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT, whilst the bomb that flattened Hiroshima had a yield of 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested, the Russian Tsar Bomba, had a yield of around 50 megatons, or 50 MILLION tons of TNT (it could have been up to 100 megatons, but the Russians thought that was probably a bit much). So there's a bit of a sliding scale here - whilst the destruction of Hiroshima was horrific, it was on a par with the damage that could be dealt by hundreds of bombers dropping conventional bombs on a city in a single raid, whilst weapons in the megaton range are completely beyond human experience.

And so, eventually, we arrive at the point of this article. It's something I've always been interested to know; how would my area fare in a nuclear war? Well thanks to this nifty overlay for google maps, you can nuke anywhere in the world with bombs of varying yields. For instance, the nearest likely target to me is the navy headquarters in Northwood, from where the UK's nuclear submarines are commanded. As most warheads these days tend to yield around 0.1 to 1 megatons, a strike on Northwood actually wouldn't cause as much destruction at this distance as I thought. It would shatter windows but leave houses intact and cause burns to exposed flesh equivalent to being splashed with boiling water. Probably a slow painful death instead of an instant one then. Why not try nuking your town at href="http://stationsixunderground.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/nuke-your-city.html#axzz1RABfMaSd"?

Mid-Century Modern Part 1 - Architecture

This post is the first in what will hopefully be a series, covering a topic that has always fascinated me - the aesthetics of Mid 20th century design, in all its forms. I'm aware that this is a very broad subject so I'll try and stop myself rambling if I can.

I'm going to put a disclaimer in here - this is a purely amateurish appraisal, in that I'm not claiming to have any academic understanding of architecture! Indeed, I would say that my first impression of this style was formed from the neutral perspective of a child, through the lens of cultural touchstones like the James Bond movies. I remember finding sets like the villain's lairs incredibly evocative, appearing futuristic whilst also clearly being a vision of what the past thought the future was going to be. Most importantly, they didn't look like anything I had ever experienced - these were not cosy, familiar spaces to live in, but spaces where your existence seemed rather incidental; clean and spacious, perhaps a little cold, but intriguing. They were spaces you wanted to explore.

The architecture of the 1950's and 60's is the inhuman channeled through the agent of the human; its shapes and materials (hard lines, concrete, steel and glass) are as far removed as possible from the organic materials and forms of traditional construction, and as such it reflects a fundamental contradiction within us. We are imperfect creatures of flesh and blood who make mistakes, but strive to create perfection, for example through mathematics or music or electronics. It seems natural that this process should reach its ultimate distillation in an era defined by polarisation - east vs west, capitalism vs communism, annihilation vs life.

In completely rejecting natural forms and materials, these structures seem to counter-intuitively compliment nature through the fact of their otherness. Take for example the Milwaukee Art Museum pictured below.



As it occupies the crest of a hill the viewer must see it imposed, from any angle, against the sky, where the absence of any other artificial forms starkly highlights its geometric nature. However, whilst at first it seems to dominate the horizon, on second glance its monolithic banks of windows reflect the sky, creating the illusion of transparency and incorporating a simulacrum of the surrounding natural environment.

From my perspective as an amateur photographer, mid-century modern buildings are fascinating subjects. Their profusion of angles and cleanliness of form means that they catch light and shadow in ways that are supremely satisfying to the human eye, as becomes apparent in this shot of the General motors technical centre in Warren, Michigan.



The same applies to this fantastic building, which is no other than the Arts Tower at the University of Sheffield, where I studied. Incidentally, it's the tallest University building in the UK. (The photo is my own).



I've lost track of the amount of photos I've taken of this building - every time I walk past it a new idea pops into my head. As part of the post-war construction boom in UK universities, it could have easily become a cheap and shabby monstrosity, but again its purity of form turns it into something more than the sum of its parts. The very simple pattern of the facade, uninteresting in piecemeal, creates an entirely different effect when seen in totality. (photo credit - wikipedia).



So there you have it. If I've managed to interest you, I hope you do have a deeper look at some buildings from this period, they capture a moment in time very poignantly. Good places to start are the Barbican centre in London, which conveniently has its own tube station, or the Southbank centre on the Thames, both of which boast fascinating architectural flourishes that merit repeat viewing.

Two birds with one (radioactive) stone

So you're a super power, you've got all those expensive nuclear weapons sitting around, and no one wants to play ball with the whole "let's fry the planet" idea. What to do? It really boils down to variations on one thing; making bloody big holes in stuff (see picture, credit wikipedia: the largest man made crater in the US).

There were various schemes for using nuclear bombs to make artificial harbours and canals, but the idea that beautifully sums up the bare faced hubris of humans is using nuclear detonations in a process I understand to be vaguely similar to todays fracking. I think you would be hard pressed to come up with a single better example of why humans do not deserve stewardship of the planet.

The concept was to use the force of an underground nuclear blast to crack open gas bearing rock and mine the results. Just the symbolism alone is enough to make you wonder how this actually got to the testing stage; "hey guys, lets poison our soil and water so we can get at this natural resource and use it to poison our air!"

I may not be a mining engineer, but it also strikes me that the possibility of radioactive natural gas burning out of control isn't something you want to be messing around with? Anyway, people realised after a while that this probably wasn't going to end well and gave it a miss, going back to desecrating the ecosphere in more conventional ways.

Turnstile: or, in case of nuclear apocalypse, please find tea trolleys and fish forks provided...

One of the fascinating things about the Cold war is the way it formed an underlayer to everyday life, in a geographical and psychological sense, having effects in the most unlikely places. The constant paranoia that typified the era was in some senses justified: in 1961, a ring of Russian spies was discovered in an unassuming bungalow in Ruislip, a commuter area just down the road from me in North West london (see below). They were found to be in possession of information regarding Britain's first nuclear submarine, and a high power radio transmitter for contacting Moscow.

In fact, it seems that my area was a bit of a hotbed for this sort of thing. Just the other side of my local park in another suburban street in Cassiobury is a vets surgery, which I have been to on many occasions, never noticing the semi sunken nuclear bunker in the back garden! This was a Royal Observer Corps outpost, which would have received and relayed information regarding Russian bombers as they approached UK airspace.

Incredibly, every day thousands of train passengers on the West Coast Mainline sped past one of the most important Cold War sites in the country, known variously as Turnstile, Subterfuge, Peripheral and Site 3 (got to love some good spy novel style codenames). This huge 240 acre bunker, hidden under the same hill which the railway's Box tunnel passed through, was officially named the Central Government War Headquarters, and would have housed whichever parts of the Government made it there in time in (dubious) safety in the event of a Nuclear attack. This was effectively a small town, equipped with everything necessary to house 4000 people for three months, featuring 60 miles of roads and its own subterranean lake to provide drinking water. The BBC has a great interactive map of the bunker (see below) the full version of which can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/content/articles/2005/11/22/underground_city_interactive_map_feature.shtml.

Going into detail about the contents of the bunker is a bit beyond the scope of this blog, but some of its features mark it out as a charmingly British preparation for the apocalypse. A pub was considered in the original plans, but was dismissed on the grounds that it might be a bit weird to be sipping a pint when everyone you love had probably been burnt to a crisp above you. As I discovered at www.burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-2/, the inventory specified that 1160 table forks should be provided, and an equal number of fish forks (God forbid being forced to eat fish with incorrect cutlery). A potato chipping machine and 11 tea trolleys were also provided. I'm being semi serious when I say most British people would, in all probability, give up hope if deprived of tea.

One final item of interest, again noted from burlingtonandbeyond.com, is the wonderfully eclectic literature requested by the BBC for use in its on site broadcasting centre. As well as the obvious choices like the Bible, the OED and Roget's Thesaurus, the dear old beeb also asked to be provided with "Cassell's guide to literature", the "Guide to the House of Commons", a volume named "Titles and Terms of Address" and a copy of "Who's Who". So, if any Lords, Dukes or Senior church members requested shelter from the Nuclear inferno raging on the surface, they could politely be denied admission with use of the correct title, and the survivors would emerge into the blasted nuclear wasteland with full plans for re-establishing a working House of Commons.

Appendix: Soviet arcade games

The subject of this week’s mini post didn’t really fit into consumer products, but I thought it was too charming to pass up. The device you see in the picture below is the “Morskoi Boi” (sea battle) arcade machine, and as an avowed video game geek, I can say that they sure don’t make them like this anymore.

It’s not what we would recognize as a modern arcade machine, being more like a traditional fairground machine in function. Instead of an electronic display, the player peers through a periscope viewfinder and fires “torpedoes” at metal cutouts of ships moving back and forth on a chain. It’s the little touches that really make this something special. At the bottom of the cabinet is a pull out podium, so that even the shortest and youngest comrades can have their go at sinking some capitalists. When you fire a torpedo a trail of coloured lights shoots off to the horizon, and if you score a hit you get a blazing flash of fire and a satisfying crashing noise.

However, the rather stern soviet government would never commission something as frivolous as an arcade game without an ulterior motive. As noted in the fascinating “unsung icons of soviet design”, edited by Michael Idov, the game was issued by the Orwell-couldn’t-make-it-up Committee on Amusement, which I can vaguely imagine tying people to chairs in basements and forcing them to laugh on pain of electrocution. The manual claimed that the game was no mere exercise in frippery, but would raise the next generation of soviet sailors, improving “visual estimation and shooting skills”. An interesting parallel can be drawn here with western attitudes towards video games. The communist state embraced the medium as a way to help the young develop skills that would be useful in the future, whereas western media has tended to ignore any possible positive effects of video games and sensationalise the negatives.

You can even play a simulacrum of the original game at http://morskoy-boy.15kop.ru/en/, and find pictures of other soviet arcade games, all of which look pleasingly industrial and unbreakable.