…I’m still here. I think…

Your Mister Cinnamon has unfortunately been busy of late, and will be back properly soon. He’s had the lack of foresight to apply for a job he won’t get and the chutzpah to ignore his reading public (both of whom he cares deeply about) and go out galavanting to see new-fangled indie bands and imbibe bowel-loosening quantities of lagerbeer.

But hark! Soon he will return with news of new and old buildings, opinion on the state of men’s trousers, something about the music of today, prattlings about photography and the rest of everything you’ve come to know and love about this blog.

New Market?

Local politicians are great. Sorry, I meant to say wonderfully dull. None of them, as far as I’m aware, are able to claim for their husband’s pornography habit as part of their expenses. And some of them sensibly blog about a variety of local issues including planning applications for interesting buildings. So, oodles of free porn to Cllr Elgood for alerting me to the proposed redevelopment* of the Old Market in the Brunswick micro-region in Hove.

This is very interesting. The Old Market is vying to become a high-status performance space but (a) has a large capital debt and (b) is annoyingly (but atmospherically) tucked away and hidden from any major thoroughfares. In the words of Ira Gershwin, what to do, what to do, what to do?

If you’re feeling generous

You could buy Mr Cinnamon a little sabbatical. He’d be ever so grateful…

ionic surprise

One of the more interesting aspects of neo-Classical architecture (in the very widest sense of that term) is how its decorative features have become almost ubiquitous. Gothic architecture doesn’t have this; the primary device of the gothic – the pointed arch – is at once too integral a feature, relying as it does on being part of a wall, and too particular, too distinctive. Putting in a Gothic arch is tapping into a rich seam of mystery and Catholicism, of heady light and holiness, of the artisan and the gargoyle.

Classicism, on the other hand, has no mystery. It is the architecture of rationality and reason; it pertains to perfection and therefore represents nothing at all. Instead, Classicism proliferates by being represented, for which we can mainly blame Palladio. All you need to make your regular rectangular room seem Classical is to dig out some copybook of pillars and porticos and – yes – pediments, scale up the appropriate feature to the appropriate size and stick it on. Easy!

Well, OK. Maybe it’s all a little more complicated than that (as Dr Goldacre would say) but sometimes that’s how it seems. What I guess I’m trying to say is that Classicism is cheap. And I really don’t mean that in a bad way – I’m a big fan of cheap. (I’m also a big fan of expensive, but that’s another story).

So here we have the excellent Rolyns News Building, of North Road Brighton. In many ways, it’s your common or garden variety news agent. But seriously – check out those Ionic pilasters. Technically speaking, they’re pretty dreadful. The building’s on a hill but no attempt has been made to allow for this, so the pilasters on the right float above the pavement and the left ones are flooded by it. The volutes – the scrolly bits at the top – are angled in a traditional way, which would be fine if they were capitals on top of free-standing pillars (where the angling helps the scrolls be seen from more angles) but in this building we’re only ever going to see the capitals from the front, so they should be the more traditional flat variety.

See? Dreadful, cheap, architecture. And I really like it. Someone – someone ordinary whose name won’t be recorded anywhere, someone trying to build a building and earn a living – that someone decided he or she wanted some architecture, something fancy and decorative and clean and acceptable for his or her building and decided on these fun little pilasters and stuck them on and that was that. Architecture doesn’t have to be great to have a purpose.

Eastside Story

So I took a trip Eastwards on Saturday over to a part of Brighton that’s fairly out-of-the-way and residential but no less levely for that. The major developments, architecturally speaking, in the East of Brighton are mostly along the seafront – the whole Kemptown fiasco. But a little further inland is the lovely Victoriana of Queen’s Park. The park was developed initially in the 1830s and a couple of fine villas built overlooking it to the north, one by Sir Charles Barry (who also designed St Andrew’s Church on Waterloo Street. Oh and some fancy-pants Gothic building on the Thames).

The only remaining villa (Barry’s excellent house was torn down in the 70s, the rotters), which dates from 1851 according to a plaque outside, is this one and it’s very pretty.

Clearly it’s been extended with an extra couple of bays on the right (though it’s so sensitively done I’ve really no idea when. Sorry, let me rephrase that. It’s so sensitively done it was almost certainly done a very long time ago.) The chimneystacks are very classy:

Nonsense and piffle (but it’s kinda pretty)

So the Graun, usually quite good on environmental accuracy, claims that this house is somehow “zero-carbon“.

And apparently this all comes from one of those clever Grand Designs from Channel 4. But what they fail to mention is that this house is built of bricks. BRICKS! and glass. GLASS! If you can explain to me exactly how those are made without any carbon being produced, well I’ll be slightly surprised. Seems like nonsense to me.

And whilst we’re on green issues, if you didn’t watch Brian Cox (no, not the one who played Sidney McLoughlin in Mad about Mambo) on nuclear fusion, then you should have done.

And whilst we’re on telly, don’t watch Vertical City unless you want to be told that tall buildings are tall and can be seen from a long way away AND NOTHING ELSE ABOUT TALL BUILDINGS AT ALL.

Good bye and big lick.

Black Lions Treat

So we have another new building in Brighton to marvel at. Well, actually and technically we don’t. I’m lying slightly in the vain hope that somehow that will make you more curious and hence more likely to continue reading. And now I’m self-referentially commenting on the fact. Oh how desperately Modern I am. Anyway, back to the marveling.

It’s science,Jim, etc.

So I thought you might not have realised that Brighton has its very own science festival. Well, now you have. I keep meaning to go (and by “keep”, I mean annually about this time for the past few years. Which isn’t really what “keep” normally means, “keep” normally being in a continuous state as opposed to a discrete one. Or a big tower with battlements and archers.

Ognatius: I keep shooting at the dratted Welsh fellow, but all that woad keeps putting me off!

Digressus: I know old fellow! It’s just not cricket, is it? Which reminds me, I must get my bat fixed this week.

Ognatius: Well would you adam and eve it? The blighter shot you in the head. Result!

Digressus: Good shot Welshie. I’m probably going to die. Which reminds me…

Ognatius: SHUT UP! *stomps on head*

So anyways, I’ll be going to the Big Science Saturday and maybe some other stuff. Because science is dead cool.

Kaplicky

Sad news on the architect front. Jan Kaplický died yesterday in Prague. Sadder still is that he was en route to celebrate the birth of his daughter.

Kaplický co-founded Future Systems and designed two of the most iconic buildings in this country in the last ten years – the media centre at Lord’s and the Selfridges store in Birmingham. Clearly Kaplický, unlike Rogers and Foster, both of whom he worked for in his career, sought to bring organic, curvaceous forms to architecture, rather than leaving them for decoration or shunning them entirely in favour of rectilinear buildings.

I admire him for his refusal to bow to the financial pressure to build glass cubes. We don’t have many buildings by him, but the ones we do have are really something. I must admit a certain reluctance to really like the Selfridges in Birmingham – it’s a bit too monumental and inflated for my tastes. Plus I doubt I’ll ever be able (or really want) to go shopping there. But the media centre at Lord’s is really something. When you go past on the bus you want to jump out and clamber all over it and see if it really is as squidgy as it looks.

Where is it written that buildings have to be boxes? … People aren’t boxes.

Regency Curves & Rectangles

Nothing too massively surprising here today. Two of the most familiar sights of the Hove seafront are Adelaide Crescent and Brunswick Square, which – if you include Brunswick Terrace – sit right next to each other vying for attention. In the eponymous cream corner we have Brunswick Square, with a fanciful mixture of detail – giant Ionic order articulated columns, giant Corinthian order pilasters, Doric columns on the ground floor, a fussy mixture of bays of differing depths, balustrades, balconies, pediments… you know the sort of thing. All very nice.

In the off-white corner we have Adelaide Crescent, which does things in a much more restrained fashion in order to basically draw attention to the beautiful reflected ogee curves that constitute the fundamental form and finest quality of the crescent. Like this: