- Spencer Tracey, quoted in the TV show Art Deco Icons, shown on BBC4 earlier this evening.

A fascinating and frightening piece by Anna Minton in the FT Locked in the security cycle describes something I did not know. Though I had noticed a more general neurotic security obsession in new developments, I thought this was merely a matter of insurance and corporate cowardice. Some of it may be. But some of it is official coercion. Minton explains:

High security is now
...continue Now securocrats tell you how to build a house]]> I have frequently noted here the obsessive fortification of the state during the last decade: how all public buildings in Britain have steadily become the opposite – closed-off, accessible only through guardrooms, by special permission.

A fascinating and frightening piece by Anna Minton in the FT Locked in the security cycle describes something I did not know. Though I had noticed a more general neurotic security obsession in new developments, I thought this was merely a matter of insurance and corporate cowardice. Some of it may be. But some of it is official coercion. Minton explains:

High security is now a prerequisite of planning permission for all new development, through a government-backed policy called Secured by Design. [...]

Secured by Design is administered under the auspices of the Association of Chief Police Officers and backed by the security industry, with the initiative funded by the 480 security companies that sell products meeting Secured by Design standards. It is also supported by the insurance industry, with lower premiums for the increasing levels of security offered by Secured by Design standards.

Beware the security-industrial complex!

Note this is enforced by state power: since the all-nationalising Attlee government of 1945-51 planning permission controls all building in Britain. It is a panopticon of the built environment, covering all significant building or alteration of building: nothing is legally done privately; nothing is legally done without prior official approval. So “a prerequisite of planning permission”, means developers comply or they don’t build. But the standards to be applied by planning officers are controlled by a ACPO – a closed professional body for senior police and civilian policing officials – and far from correcting the producer interest, as choice might, deliberately incorporate it as a driving factor.

What will we get – what are we getting – all around us? An architecture calculated to reproduce the assumptions of those in security positions and industries of what’s a good place for people to live, trade or work, for children to play or be educated. Those are assumptions about order, ‘appropriate’ persons and behaviour, the need for oversight, the nature of – and constant presence of – threat. Hence the suspicious building syndrome: you will be increasingly screened to permit entry, and watched, controlled inside the perimeter. Hard, plan-defined boundaries, rather than freely negotiated common use of space.

But look! Lots of jobs for guards and electrical maintenance crews. Compliance by large builders will make their lives easier and competition more difficult. ACPO members will find valuable consulting work. Politicians can say we live in a society with “world class” security. The execution of policy will be deemed its success. Everybody (who matters) wins. Positive feedback.

But not the only feedback loop. The authorities are not interested in contrary evidence. Public bodies and quangos are skjlled at commissioning proleptic studies, and the institution of ‘public consultation’ is highly developed as an art of obtaining affirmation for policy, but even so, there are clear signs that that official security obsession creates psychological insecurity in the populace. Minton again:

Although crime has been falling steadily in Britain since 1995, fear of crime is soaring and 80 per cent of the population mistakenly believes crime is rising. Fear of crime does not correlate with actual crime but with trust between people, which is being eroded by high-security environments. [...]

One of the key drivers for this project [Minton's forthcoming NEF-published report] is the dearth of evidence that Secured by Design and high security prevent fear of crime and create strong, stable communities. Of the few existing studies, an investigation into CCTV by the Scottish Office found that while people often believed CCTV would make them feel safer the opposite was true, with both crime and fear of crime rising in the area investigated. The author concluded this was because the introduction of CCTV had undermined people’s personal and collective responsibility for safety. Research has also found an “unintended consequence” of extra security can be that “symbols of security can remind us of our insecurities”

[my emphasis]

I would add: they also remind us of something else. The pressure for all this comes from regulatory culture. As with the fortification of the state, it reveals and propagates the intense fearfulness in authority itself. Authority is frightened of the unsupervised individual, and thinks we should be too. To recycle a phrase, they hate our freedom. The possibility that life may be lived harmlessly in divers ways is just as much anathema to a secular bureaucrat as a religious totalitarian. If rules and fear are not everywhere, we might not accept that the people who make up rules always know best.

It happened like this. The block of flats I inhabit has a door at the bottom which each of us can unlock from our flats with a remote control button, without seeing who we are letting in. This makes us vulnerable to robberies. What happened was that the buzzer went, and one of us would pick up his phone. A voice would say: “I am the postman”, or “I have a delivery for number 22″, or
...continue How Amazon is causing me to read more books and read them better]]> And not just in the obvious way, by selling me interesting books, cheaply, that I might not otherwise be able to get hold of.

It happened like this. The block of flats I inhabit has a door at the bottom which each of us can unlock from our flats with a remote control button, without seeing who we are letting in. This makes us vulnerable to robberies. What happened was that the buzzer went, and one of us would pick up his phone. A voice would say: “I am the postman”, or “I have a delivery for number 22″, or “I have come to read the electricity meters”, or “I live in number 29 and I don’t have my key on me”. It only needed one such person to be a plunderer and a liar, and one trusting householder to trust the liar, and the liar was inside the building able to steal any enticing parcels from the post boxes just inside the front door.

We don’t have a concierge, and we don’t have postal boxes that are locked. (Which may be why blocks of flats are now, more and more, big. They are big enough for all the dwellers in them to be able, between them, to afford a concierge.)

So anyway, this all makes it impossible for me now, in full confidence, to receive purchases from Amazon. They get delivered fine. But they are then liable to be stolen.

We have all learned about this, and I for one do not let people in without coming down and personally seeing them in and out. I get the impression that robberies have now abated, and the robbers have moved on. But, why take the chance? Why not, instead of getting Amazon stuff delivered to a home like mine, get it delivered to the home of a friend with no such problems, just his own single front door? Why not drop by every now and again to collect whatever Amazon stuff you order?

So it is that, instead of getting Amazon stuff for me delivered to my own home, it now all goes to Chateau Samizdata, the home of Perry de Havilland. And so it also is that I have yet another excuse for dropping by to visit Chateau Samizdata every so often, every time stuff needs collecting.

This is good in itself. There is nothing like face to face contact with good friends. Samizdata is all very virtual and twenty first century and all, but it started when people met each other face to face, and it works better if we keep on meeting in this old fashioned way from time to time.

But travelling to Chateau Samizdata has another benefit, for me. My journeys to and from Chateau Samizdata are by bus, there being no tube station anywhere near it. These bus journeys are quite long and time-consuming. The bus must thread its way through much traffic and many complicated London traffic interchanges, and make many stops. But, as the computerised and internetted age gets into its stride, I find that I now welcome such journeys. During them, I read. A book. I decide before my journey begins which book it will be, and then, when I am on the bus, I either read that book, or I do not. Those are my only choices. Many now take the internet or vast music collections with them on such journeys, especially regular travellers. But journeys like this are not quite numerous enough for me for mobile electronic diversion to be worth the extra bother and expense. I carry a book. Just one the book. Made of paper. So, on my bus, there are no distractions. Nothing else to entice me. It’s that book, or nothing. My home contains the internet, and a second cornucopia of other stored messages, in the form of many other books and CDs collected over a lifetime. How to choose? Too often, I spend scarce leisure hours swithering between these various entiements instead of properly attending to any one of them. But on a bus journey, especially one which you do quite often and thus don’t need to fret about, all such rival enticements and distractions are switched off. I have the one book, which I typically, as a result, concentrate on. I like this.

Holidays are famously the time when people read. But what if, when on holiday, you choose to take a book that you find you don’t want to go on reading? What if, in fear of that, you take too many books? And also, perhaps, a music machine? Then, how do you choose which thing to concentrate on? No, the best time to be reading a book is when you are using public transport to visit familiar but very slightly distant destinations, and going home after a few hours.

My latest purchase is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. It looks very good, but it is definitely very long. I must now contrive more expeditions to slightly faraway places.

In February, as already show in that earlier posting, this was how it was looking:

There was a time when a building which looked like that when it was being built would end up looking pretty much like that when finished. This was the time of such architectural enthusiasms as “New Brutalism”, a time better know to civilians as the age
...continue 62 Buckingham Gate nears completion]]> While delighting here in the new camera I bought early this year, I included a picture of a new building, then being constructed in Victoria Street, London SW1, near where I live. 62 Buckingham Gate is now nearly finished.

In February, as already show in that earlier posting, this was how it was looking:

There was a time when a building which looked like that when it was being built would end up looking pretty much like that when finished. This was the time of such architectural enthusiasms as “New Brutalism”, a time better know to civilians as the age of Concrete Monstrosities.

And that building above would have carried on as the misshapen oddity that it was when being constructed, looking like it had been put together by a bunch of builders who got drunk every breakfast time, while supervised by an architect who was suffering from a nervous breakdown.

But now look at it:

Yes it’s another contribution to the Buildings That Won’t Show Up On Radar style, already noted in an earlier posting I did here about One New Change. Here is another example of the style.

Partly, as I already mused in that One New Change posting, architects now do this kind of thing because they can. Whatever new thing they can do at any particular juncture in architectural history tends to get exaggerated and turned into a style. And they can do this kind of geometrical weirdness because now they have computers to enable them to keep track of it all, as they did not during the Concrete Monstrosity era.

They also have better technology, including such things as greatly improved glass of many different kinds, from which they can pick the exact one that is most suitable for their particular building.

But there is also a deeper change in play here, a change of aesthetic philosophy. One of the ideas behind the Modern Movement in architecture was a profound puritanism about the idea of a building looking beautiful. Strange to relate, architects were actually, sort of, against this. Reacting fiercely against what they saw as the mass-produced decorative excesses of late Victorian architecture, mid-twentieth century architects demanded buildings which looked from the outside what they truly were on the inside. They abominated external decoration, rather as earlier puritans had scraped away all the colourful decoration in churches, or who had cursed the elaborate make-up worn by wicked women. To switch metaphors slightly, these architectural puritans wanted buildings that were all rectangular bone, but with no flesh or skin superimposed.

This was where phrases like the “New Brutalism” came from. This was not a nickname given to an architectural style by hostile reactionaries. The New Brutalism was what the self-proclaimed New Brutalists called their own preferred way of designing buildings.

But this puritanical phase passed, not least because clients rebelled. As did the wider public. My personal theory is that architects got fed up with being abused by strangers at parties, and decided that they would go back to making buildings that got people saying “Wow!” again, instead of “Urrgghh!” But they didn’t want to accomplish this by ignominiously abandoning their twentieth century ways and going back to mere retro-Victorianism. They wanted buildings to be beautiful, and to be popularly acknowledged as beautiful, but still in a modern-looking way. Hence the look of this new office building in Victoria Street.

A consequence of this desire to make buildings look stylish, rather than merely cloddishly rectangular – “honest”, as the Concrete Monstosity architects used to put it – is that buildings nowadays typically look, as did 62 Buckingham Gate, very different when finished to the way they looked while being constructed. In their own modern way, buildings are now back to wearing make-up.

The way the new sort of glass now looks on the outside of buildings is crucial to the change of aesthetic. Concrete Monstrosities did have windows, by the acre. But the glass in them was usually as transparent as possible, to allow the structure of the building to be clearly – “honestly” – visible from outside. But the more recent trend is for the glass to conceal structure, and to have the surfaces of the building create effects of their own, by reflecting light rather than merely allowing it through unmolested.

As comments on this posting may perhaps illustrate, not everybody cares for this new style. Many would prefer the status quo ante, before modernism of any sort got into its stride. But personally, I am impressed. The only thing I really regret about buildings such as this one is that there will be so few such new buildings like this in London, for the foreseeable future. The same economic boom which funded these buildings is inevitably being followed by an economic bust, which will bring pretty much all architecture other than the most humdrum to an inglorious halt, in London as almost everywhere else.

Further architectural activity is promised for the Victoria area, 62 Buckingham Gate being towards the right in that picture. But although I will continue to snap away at new buildings in my vicinity as they rise up, I will be doing this more in the hope of more Wow! buildings, than in any great expectation.

Final thought: Well done the internet, for allowing me to learn about new buildings with almost zero bother or expense, just as soon as they start getting built. Time was when it was all you could do to learn about a building that had been around for years. Now, noting and learning about new buildings as they materialise is a doddle. Typically all I need to do these days is photo the proclamations on the outside of the building site, which typically include mention of the more modern sort of site, a website. And away I go.

That is a church called Saint George the Martyr.

Now, you may think that this church is behaving itself, but actually, it is seriously interrupting the view of the recently completed Shard. To show you what I mean, here is another picture which I took seconds later:

Now you see it, now
...continue Ecclesiastical eyesore destroys view of Shard!]]> Early yesterday evening, taking advantage of a small window of nice weather in our mostly appalling British “summer”, I took a stroll across the river. I ended up in the London Bridge area, where, just before descending into the Tube to go back home, I took this picture:

That is a church called Saint George the Martyr.

Now, you may think that this church is behaving itself, but actually, it is seriously interrupting the view of the recently completed Shard. To show you what I mean, here is another picture which I took seconds later:

Now you see it, now you don’t.

I’m just kidding (I had in mind sentiments like this) about the church being an eyesore. Saint George the Martyr looks very nice, and I find these two buildings particularly pleasing when they are thus aligned.

Earlier I had taken another picture of St George the Martyr and the Shard, but from further away. The church looks smaller, just as you would expect. But the Shard looks bigger the further away you get from it, because it becomes so much clearer that it actually is so very big, and so much bigger than everything else.

My more serious point is that the Shard, far from being an alien and intrusive presence, actually fits into big old London very well indeed, not least because it echoes some of London most characteristic and most loved architectural shapes. That’s what I think, anyway.

Some declare themselves offended by the Shard, as has already been noted here. But for me, London without its recent crop of skyscrapers would be a less appealing and far duller place. Had the Shard only got as far as the pretend photo stage, but had it never actually materialised, I’d have been very sad. If lack of money had caused that, well, that happens, when boom turns to bust. But had the Shard been politically aborted because of its alleged aesthetic offensiveness, I would have been offended myself.

Indeed they did. Here is a good photo culled from amongst these, which I found here:

I also particularly recommend these photos, which say “^John Picken- flickr/cc license” in among them, so I’m guessing that means don’t copy without asking, so I didn’t. But that needn’t stop you looking at the photos where I found them.

LATER: Wrong. “cc”
...continue Chicago’s Aqua Tower]]> While rootling around in my personal blog archives chasing up something else, I recently found myself looking again at this 2007 posting, about what looked like being a really cool tower, in Chicago. So, I wondered, did they actually build it?

Indeed they did. Here is a good photo culled from amongst these, which I found here:

I also particularly recommend these photos, which say “^John Picken- flickr/cc license” in among them, so I’m guessing that means don’t copy without asking, so I didn’t. But that needn’t stop you looking at the photos where I found them.

LATER: Wrong. “cc” means (see comments) creative commons. (I thought it meant copyright only more so.) So here’s another picture:

It’s called the Aqua Tower. Likes and dislikes in architecture are very much a personal matter. One man’s masterpiece is another’s mediocrity or worse. But I liked the idea of the Aqua Tower when I encountered it five years ago, and judging by the photos I’ve seen, I would like the reality of it now, if I were to see it in the flesh.

It is truly remarkable how similar the photos of this building are to the imaginary pictures of it when it was first announced, which is not always how it is, to put it mildly.

Says this:

Aqua certainly succeeds in making a strong visual statement, but what makes the statement noteworthy … is the simplicity and economy of the main vehicle of expression: the curvy and varied projection of the buildings concrete floor slabs. Aqua does not rely on expensive cladding materials or subject its occupants to impractical interior spaces for the honor of architectural aesthetic.

The floor slabs are a necessary part of the 82-story building’s structure and Studio Gang manipulated them to simultaneously enhance sightlines of major Chicago sites from the balconies (increases function) and give the building exterior an innovative form (increases beauty). The glass-skinned walls of the condo and hotel units behind the balcony edges are rectangular and therefore economical and functional.

Which is a more detailed version of what I said in 2007:

What I admire about this building is that, under the cute decoration, it is a bog standard, structurally and economically completely logical tower.

I also learned, here, that the Aqua Tower is the tallest building in the world designed by a woman. Her name is Jeanne Gang. Meanwhile, the men have not stopped trying to outdo each other. You suspect that with that building, we are back with “impractical interior spaces for the honor of architectural aesthetic”. And speaking of impractical interior spaces, at any rate towards the top, here in London, the Shard is nearly done, and is looking very good, or so I think.

I entirely realise that this latest phase in the history of architecture has been fuelled by silly money. But when you consider what else this money has also been spent on, I say thank heavens we at least have some good looking stuff to show for all the agony.

Click to get it bigger.

This is not Photoshopped. That’s exactly what came out of my camera when I got home.

What it is is a picture of the Shard, taken by me from the front seat of a D(ocklands) L(ight) R(ailway) automated train, as the train approached its central London terminus, which is near to the Tower of London.

Taking photos through train windows is, as all photographers know, fraught with peril, because of all those stupid reflections in the
...continue Two London towers]]> Things seem to be a bit quiet here this weekend, so here’s a picture I took earlier this evening:

Click to get it bigger.

This is not Photoshopped. That’s exactly what came out of my camera when I got home.

What it is is a picture of the Shard, taken by me from the front seat of a D(ocklands) L(ight) R(ailway) automated train, as the train approached its central London terminus, which is near to the Tower of London.

Taking photos through train windows is, as all photographers know, fraught with peril, because of all those stupid reflections in the glass of the window that you inevitably get, of such things as lights inside the train. But this time, what was reflected in the window was a tower on the other side of the train, namely the Gherkin. And since the train was going very slowly at the time, I was able to line the two towers up with each other.

Well, I like it.

The other day Jonathan was worrying about military drones. Well, you definitely want these guys on your side. Still, there are certainly peaceful applications.

For details, see the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, the GRASP lab, and Hack a day.

I was glad to visit this building, if only to go somewhere out of the cold, which has been extreme (and made much worse by the wind) but which may now be abating a little. Or maybe I’m just getting a little used to it.

I was glad also to get to see, close up, the inside of a much
...continue The Pompidou Centre shows its age]]> Yesterday Antoine and I visited the Pompidou Centre. Follow that link for the usual Pompidou Centre pictures. Here’s a less usual picture of the thing, in the form of a picture of a model of it that we encountered inside:

I was glad to visit this building, if only to go somewhere out of the cold, which has been extreme (and made much worse by the wind) but which may now be abating a little. Or maybe I’m just getting a little used to it.

I was glad also to get to see, close up, the inside of a much admired, much discussed piece of modern architecture, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano being the man who much more recently has designed London’s Shard. I don’t love all modern architecture, to put it mildly, but I find it a fascinating story.

The Pompidou Centre is an early example of a much practised style of recent years, namely the “structure and services as decoration” style. See also the London Stock Exchange Lloyds of London, designed by Rogers. In this style, architectural organs that are usually hidden inside the body of the building are instead taken out of the body and turned into visual features. As a result of using this style, Piano and Rogers turned what is basically a big urban slab into something a bit more interesting.

I have noticed that more recent examples in London of this now very common style have started out looking pretty good, but have then started to look … not so good. The trouble with decorative steel work is that it is very hard and very expensive to keep clean and smart, what with it being so very much more complicated than a mere flat surface, and so much harder to get at. And sure enough, there are Pompidou Centre details – details in full view of us visitors – which now look decidedly grubby, or worse.

The big outdoor staircase which is such a feature of the Pompidou Centre is a wonderful place to look out across (approximately speaking) the centre of Paris. The view of Montmartre and the Sacre Coeur is, in particular, spectacular.

And thank goodness for the glass, because without it the cold would have been unbearable. But, the glass is rather dirty, and a photographer like me, in among whooping with delight at the views, needs to pick his spot carefully.

And it gets worse. I was actually quite shocked to see things like this:

You expect this kind of run-downness in a now-aging provincial railway station, built in the eighties, given its last face-lift in 2000, and now in need of another. But in a prestige project in the middle of Paris, devoted to “culture” (which the French take very seriously indeed), named after a President? How did they let that happen? Answer: it’s very difficult and expensive to stop it.

I just read the above to Antoine, and he said: It’s the classic problem with a prestige project. There’s a huge photo op when it opens, but no photo op for just slapping on some new paint. Indeed. But, photography by just anyone (by which I mean the likes of me) rather changes that, doesn’t?

Inside the Pompidou Centre there was Art, which we also looked at. I hope to blog about this later, but promise nothing.