Imagine a cityscape in which the buildings and skyscrapers were able to amorphously shift form like organic structures as you passed through the urban space. Physically impossible of course, although an approximate visual idea is explored in my novel 'Digital', in which every building becomes engorged with a 'cyber lifeblood', an electronic graffiti personalised to the eye of the beholder.
The online landscape of every-changing, constantly distracting data imagery would transform and illumine all the rigid contours and static physicalities of the city. Just as the online realm allows you to be whoever you want, so too can your surroundings be manipulated at the behest of your own conscious perambulations across the web.
As a result of churning such ideas over in my mind in the build-up to, and whilst, writing the novel, this became my default mode for how I visualised the built environment. And as such, I was struck by a recent Guardian article (www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/18/rem-koolhaas-de-rotterdam-building) regarding the architect Rem Koolhaas' newly unleashed steel-and-glass behemoth upon the slender skyline of Rotterdam.
Despite the dreary title, De Rotterdam manages to elevate a captivating and dynamic vision of buildings that give the impression of having been grown as a result of natural extemporizing rather than adherence to the formal construction of men and machines. It has been termed 'cut-and-paste architecture'; the sharp-angled blocks apparently dropped unceremoniously into place and shuffled around until arriving at a comfortable statis, almost like Tetris shapes building up upon the base line.
It reminds me of a favourite quote of mine by the anti-architect Lebbeus Woods, who strove to create 'architecture drawn as though it were already built - architecture built as though it had never been drawn'.
Indeed, everything about De Rotterdam appears to be a repudiation of linear form, of the kind of arrogant monuments to neoliberal capitalism that jaywalk their way across London, locked fast in the mire of their own tedium. Buildings like the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Pinnacle, St. George's Wharf - all structures that are as uninspiring, reductive and artistically unchallenging to those who observe them as the Blair 'boom years' culture that served as the fertile ground for their growth.
By contrast, De Rotterdam gives off the impression of having never been drawn at all, or at the very least, drawn by a gang of feverish and drunk architects working in isolation from each other - the building design equivalent of 'Trout Mask Replica' in which, according to popular (yet apparently erroneous) legend, Captain Beefheart recorded his band in separate rooms, each deaf as to what the others were playing.
I like the idea that the building most likely assumes wholly new geometries and angularities whatever perspective it is viewed from. Driving by at speed or approaching from alternate directions, I'm sure the building takes on an almost pliable quality, as it flexes into intriguing new definitions.
I remember standing for hours on the banks of Brooklyn, gazing over at the Manhattan skyline, marveling at how as night set in the static mass appeared to almost dissolve into a majestic miasma of suspended light. Squinting gave the impression that the skyscrapers had become a vast freeway hoisted up by 90-degrees; the lights shimmering in simulated motion backwards and forwards, in and out of focus.
Not only this, but I like to imagine there is some subversive subtext to Koolhaas' design - perhaps a cynical commentary on the unsustainable over-population of 21st-century mega-cities, or the paranoid sense of isolation and detachment co-existent within the maelstrom of such intense human interactivity.
Thinking about this new development put me in mind of a few other structural sites of interest that I've come across on my compulsive-obsessive schlepping around London.
First, and closest to home, the Southwyck House complex on Brixton's Coldharbour Lane, otherwise known as the 'Barrier Block'. In anticipation of a major motorway development that would sluice its way through South London, the apartment blocks were preemptively thrown up as a kind of stern barricade with sporadic and spare windows that by day give the impression of a medieval castle wall updated into the Brutalist stylings, whilst at night the building looks like a Brazilian favela clustered up on a steep hillside.
Whenever I see it I can't help but marvel at the strange logic that prevailed in its design; a specification that would only have been justified in the wake of those subsequent infrastructure works seeing the light of day. A curious act of faith in the notoriously fickle and volatile construction industry. I wonder what the architects must have thought when the motorway plan was axed, the realisation surely setting in that their building design had now been rendered entirely conspicuous by its inappropriateness. Regardless of hindsight, it now takes on the appearance of a building that has resolutely turned its back on the city as a whole, shielding in on itself like an armour-plated tank.
Across the river in a wholly more affluent part of town, is Thurloe Square in South Kensington. Abutting the square on the south side you are faced with the sight of a long row of Victorian terrace houses ending in a bizarre anorexic wedge, achieving a trompe l'oeil effect akin to something out of 'Alice in Wonderland'.
The houses were built with such a diminishing depth as a means of concealing the unsightly rail line being constructed concurrently, and as such, symbolises the development of a newly-modern city trying to arbitrate between housing and infrastructure, the stationary and the transitory; as well as being a pertinent reminder of the deceptive nature of our built environment, that as they grow and expand ever more is annexed off from public access and hidden away.
I enjoy staring at this farcical construct - bringing to mind the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, and the housing facades of film set back-lots - and ruminating over the strange psychological attachments that must develop from living in this cuneiform living space that defies all habitational ergonomic conventions. What curious geometrical perceptions might arise from living within the cleavage between road and rail? It also reminds me of the maddeningly elusive statement/question posed by J.G. Ballard - 'does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?'
Similarly antithetical to the notion of functional architecture, are the 'Fake Houses of Leinster Gardens' just off the Bayswater Road. As the first tube line branched ever further westwards, a cluster of posh 5-storey townhouses had to be demolished, however, fearing the price diminution of surrounding properties, local residents demanded that the facades be rebuilt and maintained. Walking past the no.23/24 properties, a close eye is required to adjudge that these are indeed counterfeit houses; false teeth sunk into the gums of the terrace jawline.
Of course, the addresses have been exploited repeatedly by astute con men, although I can't help but envisage the houses as symbolic of the secrecy and deception that lies in the lives carried out behind so many apparently innocuous properties, as the recent shock of the slaves found to have been kept in a Brixton council flat brings all too redolently into focus.
Our built environments are bursting at the seams with architectural curiosities such as these, the thrill is hunting them down. As for Koolhaas' De Rotterdam structure - I love it, when can London commission its own?
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