Now this is something I look forward to seeing, at least virtually:

The Mile High Tower will be double the height of its nearest rival, and will be almost seven times the height of the Canary Wharf tower in London. Visitors will be able to see Africa from the top of the tower, the Sunday Times newspaper reports [...] The project will push architecture and engineering to new limits, as the tower must be robust enough to withstand the extremes of temperature and strong desert winds in the region.

What a pity it is going to be in Jeddah as much as I would like to see it up close, not even that marvel could induce me to set foot in that theocratic hell hole.

In my neighbourhood of Pimlico stands one of the ugliest public buildings in the known universe: Pimlico School. Unbearably hot in the summer (all that glass), miserable in the winter, with the sort of cavernous, Stygian style unlikely to suit enquiring young pupils, the place is being demolished for hopefully something rather more attractive. I cannot help but wonder, though, at the resemblance between the school and the main spacecraft in Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, I have not seen any Raptors flying out of the end of it.

Some people actually like Brutalist architecture.

If you buy a new BMW car, you can make a trip to the place near where these fine German machines are built, in southern Germany. These photos of the building where many of the cars are kept for their owners are impressive. One thing that people who criticise some of the horrendous modern architecture used to house people en masse in the 1950s, 60s and 70s tend to forget is that when these buildings are done right and with the needs of clients in mind, they work superbly.

Of course, some stunning cars have been made in very ordinary-looking places indeed. Like Aston Martin.

Brian Micklethwait has dug out some superb pictures of modern buildings via this guy. Amazing stuff.

I say "recorded conversations" because I never know quite what the definition of a 'podcast' truly is. Is it a podcast if you just record it and sling it up at your own blog? So anyway, yes, I have recently done a couple of these.

First, I recorded Antoine Clarke and me having a discussion about the thinkings and writings of Sean Gabb, and person often mentioned here. We are, and accordingly were, somewhat critical. Blog posting by me here.

Second, Patrick Crozier recorded him talking with me about modern architecture, "Modern Movement" architecture, skyscrapers, horrible housing estates etc. Blog posting by Patrick here.

Both last about 40 to 45 minutes. If you have that kind of time to spare, enjoy.

And, Patrick Crozier and I have fixed to do another one of these things next week on the subject of Northern Ireland. Peace (so far, touch wood etc.) may not generate news, but we think it deserves to be at least talked about. I will certainly be re-reading the comments on this posting here before doing that.

I love the Chrysler Building in New York, while the magnificent V&A in London, St Paul's Cathedral, the gorgeous French chateau of Chenonceu come very close in my list. I also have a soft spot for the city centre of Montpellier in France, if that counts.

What are your favourites?

(One commenter, I see, has chosen Britain's Sizewell B power station for its uncompromising purpose. I like the sentiment but am not all that wowed by the design. Here is a photograph of it).

Some of the more innovative and exciting buildings these days are linked to the world of sport. This may not be surprising given the vast sums of money - alas, sometimes taxpayers' money - that swirls around sport these days. Take this picture of the Barcelona FC stadium, for example. Ever since the Roman days, in fact, sports stadia have been among the most impressive buildings in human civilisation (the arena at Arles, in the South of France, has a spooky, imposing quality of its own, for example).

But of course today, if you are a sport-loving Englishman like yours truly, today matters because the FA Cup Final is being held at its traditional home, Wembley (for non-Brits, this is in west London). The new stadium looks pretty damned impressive. The project to build it has not gone at all smoothly (a sign of the possible difficulties we might expect from the London Olympics). But the wait is worth it. It is magnificent.

One of my happiest days as a youngster was in 1978, when my local team, Ipswich Town, beat Arsenal 1-0 to win the FA Cup (the Blues won the European UEFA Cup three years later. Ah, those were the days). Even watching the game on the television, you were struck by the atmosphere. In 2000, when Ipswich were promoted in a playoff, I went with friends to the stadium in the last fully competitive game to be held before the old stadium was pulled down.

Update: a pity the match between Manchester United and Chelsea did not live up to the billing. Chelsea won. Well done to them (I think one or two Samizdata contributors will be rather chuffed about that).

I took this photograph this morning in Gothenburg, Sweden. Is the building in the foreground:

(a) an electrical power station;
(b) a fish market;
(c) a church; or
(d) a sewing machine factory?

The building still performs the function for which it was originally built. Answers on a postcard please.

Swedish globalisation advocate Johan Norberg looks up a picture in a beautiful Italian church, and sees an early sign of where individualism comes from. Nice thoughts, succinctly expressed.

"Spectacular City – Photographing the Future". Photographic exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam, until January 7, 2007, and then touring, to the NRW Forum in Dusseldorf and subsequently to further venues.

One of the great things about the internet is that it is possible to start on a familiar blog, and end up not much later at somewhere you would not have imagined being a couple of links before. And sometimes, the virtual world gets left behind, and you end up somewhere in reality you weren't expecting to be.

For instance, on Tuesday of the week before last, I started at the blog of Willam Gibson (the famous William Gibson), and before I knew it I was simultaneously at the delightful Japan Probe and the website of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, which was apparently featuring an exhibition entitled "Spectacular City", which was a phtographic exhibition of modern urban buildings, supposedly attempting to reveal things about cities through photographs of their less observed details. The blogged photograph on the immediate link, the Ministry of Transportation in Tbilisi in Georgia, made the exhibition look promising, especially given that I enjoy looking at modern uses of Soviet architecture at least as much as the next guy.

As I am also someone who loves few things as much as visiting suburban shopping malls, housing estates, and transport infrastructure in foreign cities, I was intrigued. I checked the location of the architecture institute in question, and was gratified to discover that it was not in Amsterdam but in Rotterdam. This is a fitting place for it. In the sense of modern architecture, Rotterdam is one of the more interesting cities in Western Europe, although one or two Spanish cities have been making a good claims recently. The combination of a city completely flattened by bombing, and a lack of the architectural timidity of London or the pomposity of Paris (and the perhaps not coincidental fact that Rotterdam post war became one of the key points of European transport infrastructure - more on that in my next post) led to a really interesting, experimental, and modern (in the best sense) city being created.

However, the real reason I was gratified was that it meant that the exhibition was relatively easy for me to visit. By a strange coincidence, I was planning on being in Antwerp a few days later, in order to go to the slightly naff Belgian/Dutch/German version of Night of the Proms, which is somewhat less musically rarified and much more poppified than the British version, but is none the less rather good fun. That took me up to Saturday night, and my train ticket back to London was for Sunday evening. My plans had been to spend most of Sunday pottering around in Antwerp - a nice city for it - but Rotterdam is only an hour north by train, and there was nothing stopping me from nipping up to Rotterdam on Sunday and having a look for myself.

(Quick summary of the Belgian Night of the Proms: given that Tears for Fears were a band with two strong vocalists who wrote and performed somewhat overblown songs with a huge instrumental backing, they are never going to be better than accompanied by a full orchestra, a 40 strong choir on the back of the stage, three aesthetically pleasing front of the stage backing singers, and assorted drummers, pianists, and other musicians. Given also that there are a band whose repertoire really only consists of three really good songs and about four or five good ones, not terribly much is lost through their sharing a bill with other performers. On the other hand Texas are a group of slightly more musically sparse Glaswegians, and are probably better by themselves with a full set: more songs, less embellishment, and fewer distractions. Also, when they were performing the three aesthetically pleasing backup singers had changed into the most interesting of their thirty seven different costumes for the evening: outfits consisting of rather tight jeans and red corsety things that were probably illegal in Korea until recently. Male weakness meant that I was distracted. But none the less, it was a fun evening. It may not have been as fun if it had been in London, but Belgium was the right place for it).

In any event, architecture. Rotterdam. If you are a building, being the Netherlands Architecture Institute is probably like being the Vienna Philharmonic if you are an orchestra. Everybody expects you to be the Vienna Philharmonic. This is probably a bit much on an evening when you have been to the pub and have had one too many. And the NAI is a decent building trying a bit hard, but nothing really special.

Walking into the building and into the exhibition the first thing I saw was an aerial photograph of Paris inside the Periphique: the Eiffel Tower, the wide Boulevards designed by Baron von Haussman, practically picture postcard stuff
.

I steeled myself for disappointment with respect to the exhibit. Paris inside the Periphique is not a city that has grown from its lesser observed pieces. Paris inside the Periphique is a city in a corset, almost literally, although in this instance of a kind legal (and probably fairly common) in Korea. The city is full of legally protected buildings, height restrictions, prohibitions on selling newspapers in cafes, and worst of all, buildings owned and designed by governments. There is modern architecture, but it is monumental and government sanctioned. The city boundary corresponds with the aforementioned Periphique, an elevated motorway that surrounds the city, seemingly holding the picture postcard Paris within. The City is just a museum - it is full of governent but does not seem to have any sort of functional wealth generating economy within. It is beautiful, but it isn't interesting.

Paris outside the Periphique is much more interesting.

It is fashionable to decry the ugliness of Paris' suburbs. They are of course notorious for their ghastly housing estates, and for the riots of last year that took place in some of them. The French word for suburb, banlieu, has almost become a dirty word. But the situation is vastly more complex than that. It is indeed true that some suburbs are unspeakable centrally planned and now practically ungovernable housing estates. But the first impression one gets when walking under the Periphique is that here is where the actual economy starts. One finds budget hotels, car repair stores, markets selling African masks, retail parks, Asian supermarkets, working class neighbourhoods full of ordinary people who can't afford to live in Pairs proper, all kinds of things that are discouraged in Paris itself. There is unbridled capitalism here.

There is also bridled capitalism here. There are planned, gated, fearesomely rich suburbs. There are factories, low rent office spaces, medium rent office spaces, high rent office spaces. Of all the places on Earth, the one that most resembles a William Gibson novel may well be Paris.

But walking into the exhibition in Rotterdam, I didn't see this. I saw the pretty, ordered Paris of von Hausmann. It surely wasn't going to be this big a yawn? As I walked in I saw another identically sized portrait of some other city beside Paris. Okay, the plan was to present Paris beside some other, less ordered city, was it. I walked to the label at the side of the pictures and read the descriptions. 1. Paris, 1998. 2. Paris 1998.

So the point being made was the one I had just made in my head and have just made on this blog. Ordered Paris versus its unruly suburbs. And it was presented in such a way that the unruly suburbs were being obscured when you first walked in, probably intending to inspire the precise double take it inspired in me.

So, the main pont is that this may be an exhibition by and for architects (who as a rule are keener on the centrally planned than am I), but it is from smart architects. Having got to that point, there is perhaps relatively little left to say. With a title "Spectacular CIty", a surprisingly large amount of the exhibition was not in truth about cities. There are a few slightly pretentious things of things like the inside of CERN or agricultural land in South America, presumably because the curators like the look of them (or something). I will forgive this, but in a few instances a sin was committed that I consider to be almost unforgivable for this sort of exhibition: a photograph of an urban environment was presented without stating where in the world the city in question was. Cities are places. All of them have their own unique personalities and signatures and feelings and moods, and the built environment is only part of that. Putting the buildings above the place is wrong, and leads to artistic folly. It also makes it hard from those of us whose response to being particularly taken by a photograph of a place in an exhibition like this is to go and look at the place. Where is this, for instance? I have no idea. But there I can conceive of cicumstances in which I might want to go and look at it.

I think there was possibly a little too many photographs of things in the former Soviet Union for an exhibition about the modern and explicitely spectacular city. I agree completely that there are lots of weirdly photogenic and even occasionally wonderful things in that part of the world, and even that the question of what happens when you build on top of them with modern materials, design, and architectural techniques can be at best fascinating (and I have a few photographs that I have taken myself of things weirder even than anything in this exhibition) but this is in most ways a dead end. The former Soviet Union is not the spectacular future of the city. Moscow today is apparently a boom town filled with cranes, but that is a chimera. The oil and gas boom will at some point end. There isn't a self-sustaining economy at there, and the best case scenario for the next couple of decades is a horrendous cycle of boom and bust. More interesting stories are to be found in Asia, which although covered, was I think underdone.



Get used to this kind of picture. (New Fengdu, Chongqinq Municipality, China). This kind of urban environment is going to exemplify China in the decades ahead. Cities and countries develop a certain character based on what is "modern" at the moment a certain bulk of the built environment is built. (London is defined by the Victorian era. New York is defined by the years between the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. One of my favourite European cities, Porto, is defined by the Art Deco era). China's moment has been the last ten years, and it is full of cityscapes like this. At the moment, western movies and television programs filmed or set in China are focusted on the modernistically glam parts of the country or of some vision of the bast. The mundane has not yet become the Chinese mundane in non-Chinese popular consciousness, but it will. And this is the mundane. India's built environment has not yet reached that crucial moment. When it does what is modern will have changed, and India will have a quite different look from China. What it will be remains to be seen.

Oddly, when I left the "Spectacular City" exhibition, and visited the NAI's normal galleries upstairs, most of one whole floor was devoted to a discussion of Neither town nor country in the Netherlands. The point was that prior to about 1950, the Netherlands had been divided between obviously urban places, and obviously rural places. The observation that such things as large retail, associated leisure industries, light manufacturing and dirtier or more space intensive services than are tolerated in explicitely defined cities However, with the inevitable decline in the importance of agriculture, many parts of the country could be described as neither urban nor rural. In truth, in these displays the words are rather more interesting than the pictures.

That's a favourite rhetorical trick of politicians in my native Australia, to be truth. "<Something or other>is "un-Australian", and therefore being in favour of it is against everything that we in this country hold dear. As if that was in itself an argument. And heaven forbid degeneration into a collection of leisure industries. (How do the people participating in leisure activities feel about this?)

Well, three cheers for the local authorities that welcome private enterprise. Though please, oh Lord, no hard boundaries between the urban and the "Green". That way lies London, and while my love of London goes deep into my soul, the "Green Belt" around the city is the worst piece of planning in the city's history. Almost alone, it is responsible for London being probably the most expensive city in the world. London is the great white collar services city of the world, but the green belt almost by iteself prevents the economy from being more diverse than that and ensures that teachers and policemen practically starve. The green belt is almost sacrosanct if you talk to a Londoner about it. You suggest it should be abolished and they are generally appalled. You then ask them what it consists or when they last visited it, and you generally get incomprehension.

And of course a hard boundary is what the Periphique surrounding Paris is.

Actually, some of us might find something to cherish in it. (Perhaps the people participating in leisure activities).

I could make fun of statist architecture speak for hours, but that would actually not be fair. In truth, the observation and reflection found here are rather more positive than would be found in an equivalent exhibition in such an institute in Britain. The bookshop in the institute was full of an interesting (and extremely international) selection of eclectic architecture and design books. And the exhibitions upstairs and downstairs were ultimately about the same thing - how urban and semi-urbal environments are now forming out of market forces and rather clumsy attempts to direct them. I don't know if they connection was intended. But together upstairs and downstairs made for an interesting afternoon.

I think that this building (the Alexander Nevsky Orthodox Cathedral in Tallinn) is every bit as assertively a statement that the Russians are in charge as is the Palace of Culture in Warsaw I wrote about earlier this year. It comes from a different Russian era (the Cathedral is a Czarist structure, completed in 1900), but I think the motives for building the two structures were not too different . Certainly the Cathedral is in every bit as prominent a location as the Palace of Culture - it is on the top of the Toompea hill in Tallin's Old Town, directly opposite Tallin castle (now the Estonian national parliament). Certainly, also, it is every but as architecturally out of character from the historical city, which in style is a typical Baltic Hanseatic League city, although the people of the city are clearly very proud of the medieval town hall

It is only six years since I was last in Tallinn, but the city certainly seems to have come a long way since then. At that point the Old Town was beautiful, but the rest of the city felt grimy when I left it. No longer. It's not a terribly large city (half a million?) and it is not as frenetic as some larger cities, but it has the air of a place becoming, well, comfortable. Modern office buildings going up. Suburban tracts of nice, large houses being built on the waterfront to the west of town. That kind of thing. There are lots of Soviet housing estates between the old centre and the nice suburbs, but in truth I have seen worse in London. And Paris. And Amsterdam. It is difficult to believe that this was part of the Soviet Union only fifteen years ago. But it was.

And it was certainly a nice touch to be able to talk to friends in Australia using a software product that was developed here. The computer markets of China are full of people attempting to sell you cheap Skype handsets. However, Tallinn gave us Skype itself. That is worth more.

Most of us are familiar with Parkinson's Law, the one that says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

However, a TV news report last night, discussing one of the recent travails of Britain's Home Office in front of its recently constructed and newly occupied headquarters reminded me of another Parkinson's Law - same Parkinson but different law - which says that whenever an organisation moves into a new, custom-built headquarters, it is likely to be not just heading for disaster but already there. Parkinson's Law of Custom Built Head Offices alludes to the way that the process, first of deciding about the new building and then of getting settled into it, takes the attention of the people who matter away from the real job that they are supposed to be doing, and towards their own, as it were, domestic arrangements. They are celebrating past successes instead of contriving further success.

Contrariwise, people who are busy doing important and productive work that they are determined to press ahead with have no time to be fussing excessively about furniture and fittings, and they make do with whatever they have or can easily obtain from a catalog.

Once again, this law would appear to vindicated, and I can only apologise for not noticing this sooner. I've long known of this law. I often walk past the new Home Office, designed by star architect Sir Terry Farrell, on my way from my home to Free Market Think Tank Land, which is just the other side of the new Home Office from me. The Home Office's very public difficulties in recent months have not escaped me. But the penny did not drop until last night.

The new Home Office was moved into in the Spring of 2005.

Interesting how these things get around. The word of these amazing photos of Mexico City got to me from him, who got it from him, who got it from him, who apparently found them here, which is where, for me, the trail went cold.

The picture Patrick Crozier chose to reproduce is particularly extraordinary. Talk about 'fake but real'. Something to do with how the guy photoshops the pictures to make things clearer, I am guessing. I often do the same with shots I take from airplanes.

Architecturally, I think this is particularly bizarre. There are times, may the God Who Does Not Exist forgive me, when I yearn for a violent revolution in sleepy little Britain, just so that the planning permission (i.e. non-permission for almost anything remotely interesting except when the government wants it) system collapses, and people could build, in Britain's still overwhelmingly green and pleasant land, whatever crazy thing they liked. Just as a for instance, why are there not more castles built nowadays, with cylindrical and pointy towers?

Mind you, extraordinary things are still being built in Britain, by the sort of people who are still allowed to do such things.

If anyone (or thing) is looking for a heaquarters from which to run the centuries old war between Vampires and Lycan, I do think the building is perfect, however.

(For people who are wondering, the building is the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, built in 1953-5 as a gift from the people of the Soviet Union to the people of Poland).

While trying to sort out my thoughts concerning the mayhem engulfing the huge public housing projects ringing Paris for the last week or more (11 days' running) it struck me that one of the basic problems is just how dreadful is the style and character of the architecture of such places. Among the many contributory factors to the present dismal mood in poorer parts of France, it seems to me, is the relentlessly cheerless atmosphere of such places. Many of the buildings are vast tower blocks, without gardens or private enclosed spaces. Long walkways - ideal for muggers and drug dealers - connect the blocks. Without an organic sense of place, there is also a lack of spontaneous neighbourliness that is much easier to create in a terraced street.

I am not going to push this point too far. The terraced housing areas of north-west England were scenes of violence involving young Britons from different ethnic groups only a few years ago. If the French government were to demolish the greying monoliths tomorrow and replace them with low-rise homes, it would hardly represent a major advance towards solving the problems of that country. But I think it would have an effect. Perhaps someone should send a copy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities to Jacques Chirac and his cabinet as a matter of urgency. Compared to some of the advice the French administration may be getting, they could do a lot worse.

Let's not forget that one of the high priests of Modern Architecture, Le Courbusier, was Swiss (born just over the border from France), and had a huge impact on thinking about mass public housing for much of the 20th Century, and also influenced thinking in other parts of the world, including Britain. To be fair, though, I resist the fogeyish habit of damning big modern buildings across the board. I agree with fellow contributor Brian Micklethwait that there is good modern architecture that can work brilliantly and crappy modern architecture that does not. When it comes to mass housing, though, Modernism seems to be seriously unnattractive in every sense of the word.

(Correction: I originally said that Corbusier was French. He was not - by a matter of a few miles. Thanks to a commenter for setting me straight).

Meanwhile, here is a grim update on developments.

Last Monday, England won the Ashes. (If I tell myself this often enough, I will eventually believe it.) And when I mentioned this fact (for fact it is) here, I mentioned also the rather fine new stand that they have just built at the Oval, where that final clinching game of the series was played.

Today I walked across the river to the Oval and took some photos of this new stand. And I have done a posting about how it looks at my personal blog, together with some pictures snapped from the TV coverage. And then I found this really great picture of it that someone else took:

Last Tuesday, London celebrated England winning the Ashes, and I also went along and took photos of that. They are not perfect photos, if only because I had such a lousy view of the proceedings. I ended up taking a lot of snaps of the giant TV screen they had behind everything, just as if I had been at home. But, this giant screen yielded some fine imagery, with no interference patterns or surprise black horizontal splodges of the kind that I get when I photo my TV at home, and I am very happy with the photos I did manage to take. You can see my favourites ones here.

Some of favourite pictures were of the words they stuck up for us all to sing:

So there you have it. England won the Ashes because God was on our side.

Long ago, when I was "reading architecture" at Cambridge University (it turned out that you had to do more to architecture than merely read it if you wanted to become an architect), I remember noting the name of Japanese architect Kenzo Tange. The majority of the architectural gods we students were then offered as objects of worship turned out to be deluded fools, but Tange was, I believe, the genuine article.

And now he has died, at the age of 91. I had no idea that he had lived this long.

I think he deserved to, and that if for some reason he did not look back on his work with a sense of pride and accomplishment, he should have and was entitled to.

I know that many readers here loathe the architectural modernism that is being done now, just as they loathe the architectural modernism that was done in the sixties and seventies. But for me, there has been a sea change. Style is back. Expressiveness is back. The Great Lump style is being abandoned, and often dynamited.

If they look at these pictures, I think that at least some readers here may agree that this man was way ahead of his time. Now, modernistic buildings which look interesting rather than deadly dull, which celebrate the expressive possibilities of modern building technology instead of merely using it to erect giant blocks of boredom, are all the rage.

Tange did perpetrate quite a few concrete lumps, but on the whole, he did better than that.

How many other architects were making buildings as interesting and dramatic looking as this, in the nineteen sixties? Not many.

The big news in the London architecture scene just now is the fact that Ken Shuttleworth has left Norman Foster and is branching out on his own, with a new practice called simply: Make. And Make are making a huge public splash already, with this:

The Vortex, it is already being called.

"Ken Shuttleworth", I realise, sounds like one of the barmier characters in The League of Gentlemen - but believe me, if you know who this guy is you soon forget that. He was the creative brain behind the Erotic Gherkin. He was also the creative brain behind the Millenium Bridge, the one which so famously wobbled when it was first opened. But the wobbles have been long fixed, and that, like the Gherkin, is now an instant London landmark, with the view of it from Tate Modern with St Pauls in the background now being a favourite London picture postcard.

Just as the Gherkin could have, the Vortex could end up looking horribly kitsch, like a giant lamp fit only for a car boot sale. But I hope and trust that, if Shuttleworth does get it built, he executes it as well as he executed the Gherkin, which all of London (that I know of) reckons is superb.

The design rationale of The Vortex is twofold. First, although the shape is beautifully curvy, it is a shape made entirely out of straight lines, which makes it a whole lot easier to build than it looks. Not easy mind, just easier. And second, the big rents in buildings like this are charged at the bottom and at the top, apparently, so the logical shape for such a beast to be is thick and bottom, thick and the top and thinner in the middle. The Vortex obliges perfectly, and as an intrinsic result of its shape.

But the most interesting thing of all about this building, to my way of thinking, is the fact that Shuttleworth has designed it, and announced it, before he knows where it will go.

This is fascinating. Design the building, in rough outline. Then advertise it. Then get the money together and get the politicians excited, and sort out where to put the thing. This makes perfect sense. It also flies in the face of much architectural orthodoxy about how the building has to blend into its surroundings, which I rather like. Because this thing will, if done well (Shuttleworth style), blend in with anything.

No doubt there will be Americans commenting here to the effect that edifices like this spoil Disneyland-London, which exists entirely for their amusement by being the opposite of New York and Chicago. They should know that I vehemently disagree. The business of London is business and it always has been, and you can't do business only in cutesy little historical type buildings. London is a living city, and plans like this are all part of why it is living particularly vivaciously just now.

The idea is, of course, that the Vortex should be built in London. But since they haven't fixed on a particular place for it yet, there is no reason why it couldn't be built in Shanghai instead, or in Shanghai as well, and bigger. I could live with that.

The evening sun that illuminated one of my favourite views near where I live was especially dramatic this evening. And this little photo of how things looked is surprisingly effective I think. Even the little thumbnails I got I scrolled through all the pictures in Photoshop to choose a good one looked rather impressive.

But if you would like to see this rather bigger, then click on it.

I suppose there are some readers of this blog who will say, when confronted by images like this: what has this got to do with blah-blah-blah-ism (or whatever word they choose to give to the political assumptions and axioms we tend to favour here)? But, even though many readers may be puzzled, the fact is that our standing orders here are to write about what is on our minds. And what was on my mind when I went shopping earlier this evening was not the EU or the level of taxation or the importance of consenting relationships. It was how beautiful that usually quite mundane building over towards the river can look when it catches the evening sun just so, and especially when the sky behind it is also doing dramatic things of its own.

This kind of thing does make me want to have a more expensive camera, though, plus some lessons in how to use it. Because what my cheap little camera shows you is only a pale shadow of what I myself saw.

We have a posting category called "How very odd!". Now I want one for "How very beautiful!" Meanwhile, "Architecture" will have to do.

Not everyone who reads this blog will be particularly keen to know what the new EUropean Parliament building in Brussels looks like. But if you would like to know about this, I have a posting up at my Culture Blog which starts with a huge aerial photo of the place taken by someone else, and then has twenty four thumbnail photos you can click on to get to bigger photos that I took myself of this vast building when I was myself in Brussels not long ago.

It has taken me more than two months to get around to exhibiting these photos, for which apologies, but I presumably things have not changed that much since I took them. Partly this was because until recently I had much to learn about how to do this – "thumbnails" etc. (merci Monsieur) – and partly it was that, even if you do know how to stick up a mass of these thumbnails, it is still (for me anyway) a very unwieldy process to actually do, and to actually arrange them in a semi-coherent order, especially since this was the first blog posting effort along these lines that I have attempted.

The building is a scarily impressive edifice, or rather, agglomeration of edifices. I really missed not having a wide angle lens. As it was, it was like trying to photograph an elephant in a crowd. All I could do was assemble lots of details (hence the need for lots of pictures), with only occasional views that got the bigger picture, and none of the whole thing.

Which is only appropriate, considering that this is the EU, and that this entire building is itself only a relatively minor part of the big EU picture, which is itself utterly impossible to get in one snap.

This posting would normally be on my Culture Blog, but trade seems to have been somewhat thin here today, so I will put this here.

For some time now I've been wondering about this newly completed building, a new Selfridges in Birmingham. (Selfridges is a department store chain.) Some of the images at the other end of this link were faked up beforehand, others were photos of the real thing. It is the one that looks as if it is covered in giant white Smarties, or maybe frisbees.

I have not seen this building in the flesh, if that is the right word, and with architecture, no matter how good the photos, you can never really be sure unless you see it for real. But, based on what I have seen in photos, these and others, I dislike this thing a lot. It looks like the architectural equivalent of something you would find in a seriously tacky gift shop, the kind of shopt that is full of the kind of gifts that you really would not want to be given. Only the inside view of the covered-over footbridge rises above the worst sort of kitsch.

Here is what I think. It is the kind of building which needs to be surrounded by really stylish other buildings, old or new, but preferably old. This is because it makes you look very carefully at all the buildings around it, much more carefully than you normally would. For although not itself in any way beautiful, this is a building that definitely draws attention to itself. (In this respect it is not the only piece of new architecture which behaves like this. You see lots of new buildings which have this kind of effect.)

But the trouble with this Selfridges Birmingham is that it seems to be surrounded by utterly undistinguished buildings. The last thing you want is a building which draws attention to all these dreary structures. There is one church not that far away with a bit of style to it. But one semi-stylish church semi-nearby is not enough.

Let me rephrase all of the above. I think this is what I think about this thing. I am truly open to persuasion, especially of course from anyone who has actually set eyes on the real thing. It could be that if I actually saw the giant Smarties, I would be truly impressed.

The good news is that architects in Britain are now, and actually have been for some years now, at least trying to create stylish and exciting buildings. This one certainly gets A for effort. It certainly puts its head above the aesthetic parapet.

But personally, I just do not like it.

What does anyone else think?

The other day, in connection with my soon-to-end duties as the Libertarian Alliance Phone Owner, I got a call from a householder who is having a run-in with his local politicos. I gave him the same answer I give to all such persons. Write down your story, and send it in. If it is a story worth telling, we will spread it around. Here is an email to send it to. Oh, all right then, here is an address. (No email is a very bad sign. You can't do any sort of politics these days without email.) Sometimes I then have to add that we are a (heavy emphasis) publishing organisation and not a "campaigning organisation", i.e. zero expense lawyers and PR experts who will do all your fighting for you. Generally that is the last we ever hear from such persons.

But this latest call was different, because today I received an email, exactly as was promised, and these people have clearly taken the trouble to be easy people to help (a very important art if you want to get ahead in the world, I think):

Dear Brian,

As per our discussion please find below some information on my fight against overarching government Please let me know if you have any questions and if you list the story at one of your blogs. Please let me know if you have any other ideas of how I can drum up support or highlight this excess of regulation, loss of property rights and waste of taxpayer's money.

Thanks for your help

Christian
____________________________________________________________

Government spending £100,000+ to have our skirtings lowered by less than an inch!

This is a personal call for support. Hammersmith and Fulham Council has taken issue with the internal renovation of our home of a Grade II listed building (a detailed description of the dispute is on www.stpaulsstudios.com). The council asserts that the skirtings we inserted are 0.8 inch too high and has pursued us in court three times over the matter and losing each time. We have recently won again in the Court of Appeal. During the proceedings Lord Justice Longmore called the council's conduct vexatious. Despite having already spent more than £100,000 of tax payer's funds, some council officers want to continue this extremely wasteful activity.

This is the right time to have your view heard. There is a meeting by the Planning Application Committee on March 8. We would like to ask you to either get in touch with one of the councillors on the committee (preferred solution) or to express your support to us. Despite it going on for 4 years none of the committee members have asked for a site visit!

Colin Aherne, Labour, Tel: 020 8753 2192
email colin.aherne@lbhf.gov.uk

Will Bethell, Conservative, Tel: 07980 017 569
email will.bethell@lbhf.gov.uk*

Michael Cartwright, Labour, Tel 020 8741 5238
email michael.cartwright@lbhf.gov.uk

Caroline Donald, Conservative, Tel 020 8749 3859
email caroline.donald@lbhf.gov.uk*

Greg Hands, Conservative, Tel 020 7381 2593
email mail@greghands.com*

Wesley Harcourt, Labour, Tel 020 8749 3298
email wesley.harcourt@lbhf.gov.uk

Jafar Khaled, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2020
email jafar.khaled@lbhf.gov.uk

Dame Sally Powell, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2021
email sally.powell@lbhf.gov.uk

Frances Stainton, Conservative, Tel 020 7385 3672
email frances.stainton@lbhf.gov.uk

Charlie Treloggan, Labour, Tel 020 8753 2013
email charlie.treloggan@lbhf.gov.uk

The councillors with an asterix are new to the committee.

Your action can rescue us from this futile and erroneous legal interpretation and save all of us from our tax money being wasted (the rates already high enough as they are).

Yours Sincerely,
Christian and Katya Braun
137 Talgarth Road - London W14 9DA
020 8563 0612 - Fax 020 7691 7185
support@stpaulsstudios.com

Now that is how to campaign. That is how to get other people to help you. And if you follow the link in the paragraph under their subheading, you'll find further details of the dispute, just as it says, and you will be even more impressed.

This listed building thing has really got out of hand. It has got so that if they list a building no one wants to own it and it collapses into a ruin.

In our ceaseless quest to track down fine examples of modern capitalism, I lift my hat and salute blogger Andrew David Chamberlain , who has recently returned to blogging after a haitus, for pointing out a stupendous example of modern factory design in Dresden, Germany. The new Volkswagen plant is amazing, and if you follow the Car & Driver site he links to, you can see just how far things have come.

At one stage, car factories, like factories generally, were grim, smoky and frankly ugly buildings. We all know the images from old school textbooks about the Industrial Revolution, with rows of workers grinding away in massive structures belching out smoke. (Of course the same textbooks were often written by historians hostile to free enterprise, such as R.H. Tawney and Stalinist apologist Eric Hobsbawm but that is another topic on its own).

Well, for a variety of reasons, not least the massive rise in working condition standards, the quality of surroundings in a modern manufacturing plant has moved a light-year away from the Dark Satanic Mill cliched image of old.

I find it rather amusing that Germany, not a country which gets the credit it perhaps deserves for its futuristic design skills, should have come up with this terrific building. And of course the building also prompts thoughts about how styling of buildings, even supposedly very utilitarian ones like a car plant, is now a perfectly normal feature of life, as libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has already pointed out in her recently published book, The Substance of Style.

This is an thoughtful posting:

The weekend was spent in Manchester, via Oxford. On Sunday morning a friend and I visited the Imperial War Museum North, which forms part of the dramatic redevelopment of the quaysides around the ship canal on the Salford/Trafford border.

I was brought up on school trips to the Imperial War Museum in Kennington. The huge naval guns at the entrance, the trench experience, the endless tanks, artillery pieces and bombers' cockpits you can climb over, the uniforms, guns and bayonettes in cases. Regardless of your attitude towards war, you can't deny it is a fascinating collection.

So we expected something similar in Manchester, but were surprised. There are very few physical exhibits: one T34 tank, a field gun, a fire engine, and for reasons I still don't understand, a Trabant car. The cases are sparsely filled. The emphasis is not on weapons or uniforms or battles, but on the effect of war on people - refugees, children, prisoners, asylum-seekers, and peace protestors. So there were more letters and diaries than rifles and grenades. There was even a case filled with cultural items which reflect Britons' obsession with WWII: Warlord comics, action man, and Dad's Army.

There are frequent films projected on the vast walls - we saw one about children in war, and one about the 'causes of war' (it's all about oil and money).

This is not a place for a military historian or one who wants to see the development of the machine gun, but perhaps that's not what people want anymore. Does the new type of musuem reflect changing social attitudes, or is it trying to mould them?

At least the architecture of the building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is stunning, and you can buy Airfix models in the giftshop (very tempting!).

"Stunning" means, from the outside, looking like this:

Normally, I do not dislike buildings of this sort. For modern art something along these (curvey) lines is very appropriate. But put it like this, if the people who fought and died in the wars being propagandised about inside this edifice were asked what they thought of it, what do you think they would say? Or is it that I now associate such buildings with harmless trivialities, that therefore it really does not matter what they look like, and that therefore the architect might as well have some fun – but this is a museum about war?

By the way, to add some other design-related facts, the genius who did the recent redesign of Samizdata.net, and who designed this and this, and also, not surprisingly, this, also did this.

Running your own business is a pretty good way of disabusing yourself of any lingering enthusiasm for state regulation and mandatory collective provision. That those in business tend to be capitalists is an obvious, platitudinous assertion but there remains one profession which is perversely immune to free-market reason and where public sector boosterism persists, my own: architecture.

If you take the most prominent prosperous 'progressives' subtract the entertainers and journalists, those cosseted in extravagant public sector sinecures and those endowed with a generous inheritance, you can be sure that there is a preponderance of architects among the 'productive' remainder. Take George Galloway's podium partner and erstwhile Blair buddy: Richard Rogers. He is arguably one of Britain's most celebrated architects and certainly one of its wealthiest, yet his political beliefs are barely more developed than the average student union firebrand.

The architectural media shares the same core assumptions about society, economics and the public sector as the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC and if you are unfortunate enough to wade through a turgidly worded missive from the Architect's professional institutes - in Ireland we have the RIAI, in the UK, the RIBA - you will find little from which a Guardian-reading career bureaucrat would demur. Sustainability, Public Realm, Social Justice etc. etc.

Leaving aside the obvious fact that architects in the public sector or benefitting significantly from public sector work tend to favour an expanded public sector, there are a number of factors which explain why architects in general are often prone to left-leaning politics.

1. Architects are romantics. What I mean is not so much that they will conjure up fantastical confections out of the most prosaic brief but that they romanticise their role as designers. Even the most talentless hack, plugging away in an overlit identikit box on an industrial estate churning out designs for yet more identikit boxes on industrial estates, secretly dreams of his life's work being compiled into an Oeuvre Complete. Where everybody else sees his bland grey carpeted The Office, he sees a Corbusian atelier. One of the pre-requisites for the socialist mindset is the ability to post-rationalise, explain away or otherwise redefine the dogged refusal of real life to conform to marxist dogma. Architects have a head-start on everyone else in that they apply this process to the gap between their own self image and reality.
2. Architects think in soft pencil. In the initial stages of any design, the most merciless, withering critic of an architect's ideas is a finely sharpened 3H pencil lead. There is no room for ambiguity and no possible alternatives are suggested by a line which starkly delineates all the flaws and infelicities of your designs. A soft pencil flatters your proposals and elides - for the moment - the flaws. This is crucial for the design process but inculcates a propensity to fudge or avoid difficult questions, theoretically for later resolution. This way of thinking is excellently suited to designers and to subscribers of simplistic political philosophies.
3. While most architects work in businesses which are subject to the same market forces as every other business there are two specific features of architectural practice which act to negate or at least deprecate the information the market is trying to impart. The first is the cherished notion that architectural practice is a vocation. This is drilled into students at architecture school and can be reinforced by the fact that, for many architects, architecture is a hobby as much as a career. Many architects hate to sully their relationship with a client by issuing a fee account and will often favour the client who offers them interesting schemes to design but consistently dodges payment over a stolid well paying but less imaginative client. The other is professional solidarity. In practice the world of architecture is no less prone to backstabbing than any other but in theory we imagine ourselves as "colleagues" and our professional code of conduct does not only apply to our relationship with our clients but also with each other.
4. Architects are planners. Forgive me yet another obvious assertion but the point is that there is little that the architect imagines cannot be planned. If you can design a house, you can design furniture for that house or the city in which that house is located, so goes the thinking. If a chair, a house, a city, why not an economy?

I feel about skyscrapers the way lots of other libertarians feel about space travel. I may have all kinds of doubts about the purity of the capitalism that gives rise to them, but… wow! And I want now to mention here a particularly impressive one, soon to be built in London.

I'm talking about London Bridge Tower.

I have already commented on this tower as a mere plan on my Culture Blog, here, and before that here. But what I later missed was that last November, the building received planning permission and is now definitely going to be built.

My first reaction to the first faked photos I saw of this immense spike was that it looked like a paper dart that had already been thrown a few times and had had its spike somewhat damaged. Now, I find myself looking forward to its construction immensely. Expect photos here of it as it takes shape in the years to come. Building starts in 2005 and will be complete, or such is the plan, in 2009.

It is to be built in one of my favourite London places, namely on the south bank of the River Thames, which just gets better and better with every year that passes. Recently they have added the Wheel, and the undeniably impressive if decidedly fascist looking Bankside Power Station has metamorphosed into Tate Modern, the interior of which is very fine even if it does not seem to contain much else that is much good most of the time. Eventually they may even sort out that nothing space next to the Wheel. You can already walk all the way along the river on the southerly side through the centre of London, and this tower will only add to the fun.

The reason why London Bridge Tower will be such a draw is that we will not just be able to walk past it and gawp up at it; we will also be allowed to ascend within it and gaze out upon London, from a viewing gallery half way up, and from another public spot near the top. What this will cost I do not know, but I will be doing one of those trips at least once, I can tell you. Quite how all this public participation was contrived, I don not know, and no doubt some of the politics involved was of the sort we here might not approve of, but personally I am delighted about all this.

This tower is the work of Renzo Piano, who co-designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Of this massive object he has this to say:

I don’t believe it is possible to build a tall building in London by extruding the same shape from bottom to top. It would be too small at the bottom and too big at the top.

Likewise, symbols are dangerous. Often tall buildings are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, selfish and hermetic. The tower is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline. Architecture is about telling stories and expressing visions, and memory is part of it.

Our memory is permeated by history.

How nuanced. How European. He even manages to turn the tallest building in Europe into an anti-American statement. Well, if that is what it takes to get a thing like this built, then well said Renzo, I say.

And even if you disapprove, it can not possibly end up being as big an embarrassment as this. Although I find that I like the look of that also, more and more, however totally useless it may be. It is the Space Shuttle of skyscrapers, you might say. Concorde pointing upwards.