Author Archives: Charlie Whitaker

About Charlie Whitaker

Charlie is an architect living and working in London. Increasingly, he is also a philosophy graduate of Birkbeck, University of London. When he is not doing his real work, he puzzles needlessly over news stories and current events.

Our boys on the x front

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Uh oh. David Cameron’s moving into the phase of his leadership career where he says stuff out loud. For instance, he now has an official view on what our attitude to the military should be:

But supporting our Armed Forces isn’t just a government responsibility – it’s a social responsibility,” he said.

In the First World War those at home didn’t just sing ‘keep the home fires burning’, they practised it. In the Second World War, the military occupied a huge place in the national consciousness, partly because everyone knew someone in uniform.

I believe as a country at war we should see the same appreciation today, with the military front and centre of our national life once again.

Of course, we now have (a) an all-volunteer military and (b) a much smaller military, in terms of numbers in uniform. It’s odd that Cameron doesn’t seem to recognise these facts: they can’t but make for a large difference in the relationship between the military and the population in general. What’s harder to explain though, is why he felt the need to say something like this in the first place. I don’t detect any antipathy to the military itself, or towards its members: on the contrary, your typical Brit turns up at Navy Day, or any time there’s an RAF air show, and we are talking of attendances of up to 100,000. That looks like enthusiasm. So is it just that ‘public should support the military more’ is a current MOD talking point and he got briefed to say it? Or does it reflect Tory nervousness about the set of foreign policies inherited from New Labour?

In the polling booth

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So there I was, all ready to convert my well formed pro-Liberal Democrat voting intention into a mark on the ballot paper, when this strange mist descended, and all I could think was: is there any way – any way at all – to stop this place going Tory? So I went for the Labour guy instead. Good luck, Martin.

As it happens, there’s also some local elections on around here and the single Green candidate picked up my vote, along with two randomly selected Lib Dems.

Polling continues until ten tonight. It was busy down there. Anyone else had any booth moments so far?

Only drinks water from the source of the Cherwell

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I’m still busy not following the election, but I couldn’t help noticing that the Daily Telegraph agrees with my analysis of how things work in British public life. The difference is that having a leadership caste is AOK in their book, hence their careful observance of all the appropriate hagiographic tropes. Read it here: ‘David Cameron: born to be prime minister’.

Update: Gordon unblocked. If only you’d started like this.

Aiming for best-in-class product at all times

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I’ve decided that Layla Moran, the Lib Dem candidate for Battersea, is going to get my vote next Thursday. I’m a Lib Dem voter and party member of fairly long standing, so admittedly this is nothing out of the ordinary for me. Battersea (Lab: Martin Linton) is something like number three on the Conservative target list, so I don’t expect any miracles. For a long time I was going to try to help resist the conversion to the blue team, but I no longer think a tactical vote will work and I’d rather be counted as adding to the Lib Dem vote share nationally. Also, Layla seems to be doing a decent job of campaigning, and could use the encouragement. I’ve wondered if my cognitive task here could have been eased if only I’d known just a little bit more about the intentions of the other Battersea voters: just one tiny local opinion poll, no? (Update: wish granted, sort of.) Perhaps someone who knows about game theory knows whether or not information like this would have helped, because I don’t. What I will say is that I’m very happy to have made my mind up because now – thank christ – I can stop following the election.

Further, and whether I’m justified in this or not, I’m going to conjecture that lots of other people, having similarly invested in their own decisions, are also tired of the election; and that for this reason we won’t see much movement in the opinion polls before next Thursday. Additional evidence: the percentages in the ‘who won the debate’ polls seem uncannily close to the voting intention polls. So, depending on how exactly these percentages translate to seats, we’ll see around three hundred Tory representatives in parliament come Friday: this is my belief. Even if there’s not a Tory majority, there’ll be a Tory political mass which is bound to have some effect on something. It’s not that the nation is now more Conservative – the Tory vote share won’t have increased by anything much – the problem is that only a coalition will be able to shut the Tories out. The Labour vote is collapsing and the Lib Dems can’t win enough seats to take over the job that Labour was supposed to do.

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Bamfordshire

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A post by Phil Edwards on the Tory phone box posters links to Jonathan Raban’s review of Phillip Blond’s Red Tory. Blond is known to be the think-person for Cameron’s Big Society concept, of which we’ve been hearing … well, we heard about it earlier in the month, I think it was a Tuesday. Raban locates the intellectual heritage of Red Tory in the Catholic Distributist League; a 1920s movement championed by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. New to me, but the basic idea seems to have been more or less this: widespread property ownership is good; rural life shows the way. By all means, be a capitalist, but be a capitalist with a small shop, or a small farm; serve the needs of local folk for a fair price. And go to church.

David Cameron’s constituency is Witney, on the Oxfordshire / Gloucestershire border. This is a part of the world I have some experience of; it’s where some of my family live. I won’t name the village, but Cameron is their MP, and don’t they know it. I’ll try to describe what it’s like around there.

Just as the Distributists would have wanted, a church features centrally in every Cotswolds village; there might also be a common, or some stocks (disused, but cherished). Generally, there’ll be a clear visual hierarchy; it’ll be obvious today, as it would have been three hundred years ago, which houses are supposed to be those of the wealthiest and most dominant. There may be a tract of social housing; but it won’t be central, or in the most picturesque part.

Nothing new in any of that, you might think. But there’s more. The settlement pattern of your typical Cotswold village reflects the historical pattern of English agricultural land tenure; you find houses standing side by side along a central street, each with a strip of land out back. Once, the strips were long and were farmed; today, they are truncated into gardens where some people grow some vegetables. This allows an illusion of self-sufficiency: produce is traded locally, often on an honour payment system (someone puts a basket of tomatoes on their garden wall, and you pay for what you take). But if you did some basic agricultural economics here, you’d quickly show that if the locals tried to eat only what was truly local, and if they tried to pay for it with what they themselves made locally, they’d starve. Despite superficial appearances, they’re just not equipped or organised for that. Artisanal enterprise? There’s a silversmith in Stow-on-the-Wold who might be good for a stirrup cup, but you’ll look long and hard before you’ll find an independent maker and vendor of shoes, saddles, wicker trugs, garden trowels or whatever else it is that’s supposed to be made, sold and used in the countryside.

Even if the locals were equipped as if for the agrarian idyll, I’m not at all sure they’d enjoy it You have to look to what’s not so obvious as you stand in the middle of a Cotswold village: the machinery that makes the whole lot viable and – for some – a lot better than bearable. There are railway lines that make villages into practical commuter settlements, for instance. An older innovation, sure, but the station car parks still fill up reliably on week days. And if trains are not your thing, there’ll be four-lane roads and/or motorways within twenty minutes’ driving time. Either way, you’ll have a car. Further, the blanketing with transport infrastructure means that you won’t just get access to your ordinary high-capital, high-energy, large-scale, globally-supplied need satisfier such as Tesco Extra; interesting retakes on the shed retail concept are also reachable. Daylesford Organic, for instance: a creation of the Bamford family (as in the manufacturer J. C. Bamford). Officially it’s a ‘farm shop’ but it has too many parking spaces for that. What’s more, produce doesn’t just leave the Daylesford Organic farm shop by truck (for the other Daylesford stores, and also for the Ocado distribution centre); it arrives by truck as well: I’m thinking of the Italian olive oil and the Spanish almonds. I don’t know where they get their trugs.

I’ll save the holiday travel habits of Cotswoldians for a later post. I think it’ll be obvious what my point is. Much of what is presented as ‘small scale’ and ‘local’ in the constituency of Witney isn’t small small or local. It’s just more of your aspiration with a countryside theme. The people who buy into Witney are the type who like to patrol the parish bounds with the dogs; they’re usually English-esque – pale, clean shaven and corduroy clad in the case of the men – but they come from all over. And the people who start their lives in the village council estate and then leave; well, they go all over. Alex James, in his extraordinarily creepy 2007 puff piece about the Bamford retail operation, says that “there is not even a hint of the bad things about the world here”. But you can’t start with a visual aesthetic and end up with a social policy. If what you see around Witney is what inspires Blond-ism and hence Cameron’s Big Society, then both of those are just self-comforting fantasy.

PS: check out Tamara Drewe.

Tory phone box posters

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I found these when googling for information about the “strong families, strong society” poster of which there is an instance in our neighbourhood, which itself is part of an ultra-marginal. I have no idea what the Tories intend with this stuff. It looks as though Dave / George tossed around some ideas for slogans at a power breakfast and some budget got allocated in a strategy conference call. Then a Saatchi exec briefed a creative team before popping out for a lunch lasting the rest of the week. Finally, a graphic designer got to implement some favourites from a book of classic mid-20th century political two colour lithographs. There wasn’t any review prior to final sign-off. Just look at that schedule, man. I’ve got literally less than three minutes. Two minutes. Thirty seconds.

The ‘strong families’ one is accidentally ironic, since the sampler design recalls the pre-suffrage era: women teaching their daughters how to sew, etc. This cannot possibly be what the Tories consciously mean. Whatever, I can’t see how it’s going to get traction; not in in this part of Wandsworth at any rate. On one side of the road you’ve got your Montevetro building (£2,500 pw) and the heliport; on the other, you’ve got a council estate. The concept of ‘home-maker’ just has no targets in range.

And why phone boxes? I see a phone box and I think: there’s a functionally superseded structure with an enclosing plane removed. A Battersea power station in miniature, even. Or I think: there’s a potential / actual tramp toilet, depending on whether or not stool is visible. Is it meant to be street, or guerrilla, or something like that?

Update: Phil Edwards sees a common ideological source for some of the Tory phone box posters: the Chestertonian distributivism of Philip Blond. Maybe so. But take “big government=big problems”. It’s pretty empty; you can imagine many sources for it. It could be straight up Randian, for instance. I’d still put this lot down to some sort of ‘brain-dump’ session; the total product of which will have included a fair few aborted and abandoned word strings. These are the good ones.

The ArcelorMittal Orbit

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The ArcelorMittal Orbit is compared by its sponsors to the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, two nineteenth century French constructions. I think a better comparison is with the Atomium, left over from the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. The Atomium is accessible to visitors, and gives the kind of view of Brussels you’d expect from its peripheral location in Heysel Park, north of the city, with the addition of a hundred metres or so of elevation. Originally, of course, it gave a modestly elevated view of the World’s Fair. Show us what you can see from a hundred metres above a suburban festival park, plus lunch: it’s not a strong brief for a project, but in that something like the ArcelorMittal Orbit or the Atomium can be said to meet a practical purpose at all, this is that purpose. The Statue of Liberty? That gives you a view of the Manhattan skyline from across the water of New York Harbour; not life-changing, perhaps, but notable. The Eiffel Tower? That gives you a view over Paris from the city centre, plus an excellent lunch (if you can afford it). At the time of construction, the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure (taking the title from the Washington Monument, surprisingly). If – as is not the case with the Orbit – your pointless project can claim a compelling location and at least one superlative, you’re off to a reasonable start.

Beyond function, though, lies the issue of icon-icity. The ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to do the cultural job of a Statue of Liberty or an Eiffel Tower; It’s supposed to be a draw, simply in virtue of its design. Here, my tone is snarky, but I actually do think we have something that doesn’t just fall short, we have a wreck. I’m going to try to say why this is, and why it matters.

Many pubic artworks get a beasting, of course. People have come to love Gormley’s Angel of the North after hating it. I don’t think this will happen with the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

First, there’s a problem of resonance. What connections are we supposed to make when we experience the Orbit? The Atomium – my preferred comparator – is defiantly ahistorical. It’s said to represent an iron molecule; if we were to think sufficiently airy thoughts about the Atomium, we might say that it stood as a metonym for its own substance: steel, mostly. Materials science: very 1958. You have to try that bit harder with the ArcelorMittal Orbit. The designers talk vaguely about the idea of structural instability and the Tower of Babel (intending the Breughel painting, I’d guess, but it’s possible that they got in a muddle and were actually thinking of the Monument to the Third International). Now those are odd choices: the confounding of language, the scattering of nations, things falling over; is there a cautionary intent here? Are we celebrating these things? As for what’s unstated, I suppose the creative team would be pleased if spectators were to think of any of the following clever things (in no particular order): Klein bottles, Calabi-Yau manifolds, trombones, flayings. But the ArcelorMittal Orbit also calls to mind the dull precedents of Wembley Stadium (the tubular latticing) and the observatory towers of the New York World’s Fair of 1964 (the round observation deck). I don’t think the designers intended those associations; I think they just stumbled into them.

Worse, the design is conceptually weak. This isn’t an accusation to be tossed around casually, but I have reasons. Early sketches show a continuous, looping line or thin tube of constant thickness. Apparently the team then attempted to force a lift, a stair and a viewing platform / restaurant into that form, distorting it in the process. What’s more, the designers didn’t apply a ‘language’ to these new but essential items; instead, they used ordinary geometry and neutral colours. This suggests a wishing away. Most architects recognise (eventually) that wishing away won’t work and learn to integrate what’s needed within the framework of a concept that’s developed in anticipation.

There’s also compromise in the proposal’s major expressive component: the looping tube(s). In other pieces by Kapoor, tubes appear as you’d expect tubes to appear: as continuous surfaces. In the ArcelorMittal Orbit, though, the tube(s) is realised as an open lattice. This contradicts the design team’s formal choice. Now there are good structural reasons for using a lattice; triangles are very rigid and surfaces offer more wind resistance than open frames. Wind forces on tall structures are significant. One major structural concept selected for the Eiffel Tower aims to optimise for wind overturning; this concept gave the tower its tapering profile. (I say ‘aims to optimise’; it may in fact not be optimal.) But there’s no such alignment of thinking in the Orbit. It looks instead as though a decision was made – cynically – to maximise the use of steel componentry. The project’s sponsor, of course, is Lakshmi Mittal.

Finally, and worst of all, the ArcelorMittal Orbit is literally repulsive; it’s blood red, it looks biological, like intestines. Here, we leave the Atomium far behind: the Atomium doesn’t disgust. I don’t want to speculate on human psychology but it’s conceivable that disgust responses are ‘hardwired’, as they say. If this is so, then even if the current cohort learns to love the ArcelorMittal Orbit, having mastered its own shock reaction, there’ll be future generations who’ll be disposed to hate it.

Some say they enjoy being shocked. Some film directors know this. In his War of the Worlds remake, Spielberg has his aliens keep humans in steel cages slung beneath the rear of their tripods; when the aliens get peckish, a round hatch like a camera iris gapes open (cue horrible screaming) and a large hollow blood red tentacle comes out and has a good feel around for a flailing limb. Once it limpets on, it sucks the victim into the tripod interior. You see this and you think: OK, Mr Spielberg, you got us, that’s truly disgusting. You are the master here. Anyway, the point is that the ArcelorMittal Orbit reminds me of that scene. You too, most likely. So visitors to the 2012 London Olympics are going to get to enjoy something that resonates with gore. You might wonder if that’s what they will have been wanting.

Any public benefit / disbenefit point is of course arguable. Like most, I think we’re better off with a permissive approach to public art; one that steers well clear of entartete kunst thinking. But we’re not talking about your run of the mill art project. To the extent that the ArcelorMittal Orbit is supposed to represent Britain – not that Britain asked to be represented in this way – it looks to me like a bad mistake to pull out something like this. Obvious interest-promotion; a failed attempt at cleverness; laziness; provocative sourness, even. Probably not what you want in an official culture, if you’re going to have one at all.

Long before you even got close to those scary ratios

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James Galbraith:

For ordinary people, public budget deficits, despite their bad reputation, are much better than private loans. Deficits put money in private pockets. Private households get more cash. They own that cash free and clear, and they can spend it as they like. If they wish, they can also convert it into interest-earning government bonds or they can repay their debts. This is called an increase in “net financial wealth.” Ordinary people benefit, but there is nothing in it for banks. And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth. … All of this should be painfully obvious, but it is deeply obscure. It is obscure because legions of Wall Streeters–led notably in our time by Peter Peterson and his front man, former comptroller general David Walker, and including the Robert Rubin wing of the Democratic Party and numerous “bipartisan” enterprises like the Concord Coalition and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget–have labored mightily to confuse the issues.

Money is not my thing. Is he right?

Was there something you needed from me before ten?

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The American NPR web site has a nice story about what happens when a company / organisation’s management stops caring about when employees come to work. And what happens is that employees not only get better lives, they up their output; at least, this seems to be the case for the organisation featured.

Coincidentally, the Guardian today carried piece about John Lewis; a large UK retail partnership. At John Lewis, as you’ll know, every employee gets a meaningful share of profit, and they do turn a profit. I remember similar pieces in the 90s about Cisco Systems, where lots of the staff (all?) have shares. Cisco are still doing pretty well, as far as I can see.

I’m going to go out on a (not very long) limb here, and say that if there’s a go-getting future in – ah – our future, it’s going to involve an increase in this sort of stuff. What it ain’t gonna be made of is this:

… challenges aren’t faced by Britain in isolation. Across the globe other nations are adapting to massive change. They are responding to the democratisation of knowledge through new technology, the increasing mobility of capital and labour, the entry of billions into the world economy, the liberating power of scientific breakthroughs, rapid improvements in education and the collapse of social rigidities which inhibited growth, opportunity and innovation.

Because that’s empty talk. If you’re going to say there’s change coming, you owe it to us to say what kind of change. From where to where is capital and labour going to move? Which social rigidities are going to collapse?

To help us fill in the blanks the way that we’re supposed to, Gove gives us, yet again, the theme of New Labour turning back into Old Labour; observe that they are “in bed” with the unions (again); there are strikes (again). Implicitly, various horrors will come to pass: perhaps you’ll miss your flight; perhaps there’ll be power cuts. And worse than that, owing to unionisation, British companies are going to fail. Relentless global competition (the white heat of it?) means only one thing: no jobs. And so on, with a scattering of “deep red”, “dinosaurs” and “class war”.

This is, um, a scratched record. Or a Stockhausen tape loop, perhaps.

Anyway, since we’ve been challenged to think of change and progress, may I just say that I don’t think it’ll work this time around. Frankly, the people who pick up faithfully on this message are getting on a bit.

Update: Justin notes (his reporting is a bit more accurate than mine) that what Gove thinks New Labour is “in bed” with is “the past”. They’ve been “recaptured” by “the spirit of Seventies socialist nostalgia”, apparently.

Slew in the direction of Dalston

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British police forces are making plans to deploy surveillance drones in UK airspace, the Guardian reports. Kent Police is leading the project; four other police forces have signed up. The drones look to be (relatively) cheap and simple machines that are battlespace tested: a manufacturer – BAE Systems – has evaluated its candidate drone (HERTI) in Afghanistan. The Guardian says that only CAA licensing now stands in the way of domestic deployment.

A news piece like this has an aspect of dark comedy. Many people have worried for a while that UK policing has become militarised; here’s a story that’s confirmatory to an absurd degree. What’s next? Precision targetting of Harehills with JDAMs? Don’t be ridiculous …

You’d think there might be some legitimate role for surveillance drones in UK policing. After all, helicopter surveillance and CCTV are both legitimate, and drones constitute the intersection of those methods. Nonetheless, intuition tells you that something is horribly wrong here. But what is it that’s wrong?

The Guardian’s story – and they may be getting over-excited, but I tend to think not – says that Kent Police started out by claiming that the drones were to be used to monitor shipping and illegal immigrants. You might think that at least the shipping part of that would be OK; seas and shipping being what they are. But it turns out that these claims were just spin on the part of Kent Police; they always had a wider role in mind. Documents disclosed to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act suggest Kent Police would also like to use drones to monitor “antisocial driving” and “event security”, and also to conduct “covert urban surveillance”. Of course, this last could cover just about anything. And this, I think, points to the problem; it’s a problem of proportionality. Someone, somewhere, has lost touch with the relative seriousness of things. Not only that, they’ve lost touch with what constitutes a safe environment for policing. Is the view from their doorstep just a blur of hurt and evil doing, or what? It doesn’t take much discrimination to be able to tell that “theft from cash machines” won’t justify the same sort of efforts at risk reduction as attempting to interdict bomb plotters in a ‘failed state’. In certain parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s almost impossible for someone in uniform to move around safely. Britain is not like that at all, and you’re only going to infuriate and alienate British people by seriously suggesting that it is. So what do Kent Police and the other collaborating police forces think they’re doing making plans to hide in a bunker and send out Predators?