The Ribbed Vault

It is with some regret that this blog post isn’t about actual ribbed vaults, those astonishing Gothic creations that spring to pointy perfection in the great cathedrals of our splendid land. I will add to my previous list of “stuff about which I intend to write” a comprehensive deconstruction (so to speak) of aforementioned architectural feature.

I also intend to write about this soon but for the time being I’ll abandon my usual decorum to say simply that the Pope really is a knob.

But no, you don’t want to read this – you want to read Ribbed. Ribbed, you say? Ribbed, I say. It is, as you now know because you’ve right-clicked on that link and selected “open in a new tab” and now up there on the top right is a tab saying something like R I B B E D | M A G A Z I N E  so you know it’s a magazine because that’s what it says, a magazine.

I’ve written a couple of pieces for them. Actually that’s not accurate. I’ve rejigged my piece on the rise and fall of men’s trousers (the original is back here somewhere… there it is); I’ve also written a brand new essay on (loosely) architectural sympathy with some top-notch drawings by the very talented Yasmine Balfour-Lynn (one of them is the wrong building but that’s probably my fault.*)

You’ll have to do some digging around on the website to find them – it’s all Flashy and stuff so I can’t link to them directly. One’s under Art and the other under Fashion >> Features. The screen might make you feel a little seasick. You should also check out the Shadow Children (or SC.) fashion editorial beautifully lensed (conjugate that, baby) by my good friend Mario Mendez. Hats off to the lovely Alex Wilson (who also took the photos of the slender betattood gentleman that accompany the trousers piece) and the delightful Matilda Finn for pulling the whole thing together.

Sorry for moonlighting on you both. I’ll be back soon with stuff and things.

*it wasn’t in any way my fault. Grrr.

That was the year that was

Hello once again dear readers both; and the heartiest of greetings for this, the final post of the year. Nay! The Decade! I realise that I have, to my chagrin, not been nearly as committal to this blog in 2009 as I might like to have been. But there we are. Not that I’ve been moonlighting elsewhere, just that the pictures and words have not been so easy to pull together in marvellous mêlée of meaningful monographs. So, for the new year I offer vague promises to write up past visits to such glamorous places as Portslade, Chichester, Bexhill, Lewes Road and Lewes itself (possibly). I also have posts lined up on Mansion Flats and – ambitious, this – the invisibility cloak as architectural bunkum. How d’you like them apples? And you might even get the long-awaited-two-years-in-the-making post on Hawksmoor. Trust me, it’ll be really, really boring.

To keep you going, I’ve trawled my photoalbum for photos that might otherwise not make it onto the blog or, in other words, pictures of buildings that I have taken but that I have nothing to comment on particularly other than to say, “well, that’s nice!” Which is something I intend to do more of on here as well.

The very whooshy Grand Parade Annex of the University of Brighton, 1967 by Percy Billington. At night. Obv:

The Royal Pavilion (1815-22, John Nash) in the snow:

The monumental, almost post-modern, split pediment above the entrance to Southwark Town Hall, 1934:

Big Onofrio’s Fountain, Dubrovnik (Onofrio della Cava, 1438) from on top:

And this, from somewhere in the depths of downtown Manhattan:

So all that remains is to wish you (both) a very happy 2010. May the buildings be better and the photos not so blurry. Happy New Year!

Love old folk, hate bad architecture

As both of my avid readers will know, I’m not one to harp on about bad architecture. We have to look at it enough in our daily grinds, so – my thinking goes – let’s not pollute the clean, pristine, unsullied wonder that is the internet with such unwholesome images as the pictures you are about to see.

However, I have a wonderful bus commute which is ruined by this vile construction having been plonked down on Edward Street (or possibly Eastern Road – it’s difficult to know when one becomes the other).

Oh my. Take another look, if you dare. IT’S HIDEOUS! It is a meritless, witless, graceless building. It is at once brutal and ramshackle. And the good people at Hanover spent £13.6 million on this wondrous block of retirement apartments for the old folk of Brighton. Let’s see what else they could have got for their money.

Ooh, look – they could have bought Pasta King! “Healthy Tasty Fasta Pasta!”

See. Surely that would be less offensive. OK. So. Why is it so bad? Get your protective eyegear on, we’re going in for a closer look.

This bit’s nasty. The bars across the doors are just mean. Would a balcony or five have killed you, Hanover? And then there’s the windows. The formation flips on every storey, giving this terrible sense of restlessness. Those bars seem to zig-zag down the middle; there’s no sense of balance. If there wasn’t so much coma-inducing just-white wall in between all those cheap, undecorated uPVC openings you’d fear for the block’s stability.

Then there’s the brickwork.

Two-tone! Whoop! I love bricks, I love them more than maple syrup. I love the way the Victorians used blue ones and red ones and yellow ones and pink ones…. Great stuff. This, though, this is wrong. Here we have a big block of brown in the same building as another big block of a slightly lighter brown. Sheesh.

Bay windows. Everyone loves a nice bay window. It harks back to a fine Regency tradition. Lovely; let’s put one on every floor:

AAAAAAARRRGGGHHHHH!!!! What the ‘eck is that?! That’s not a bay window – that’s a mistake, surely. Someone could get a nasty cut on the corner of that.

The roof. Surely the gently sweeping, calming green roof can’t offend…

This is what we in the aesthetic trade call an ogee. Alan Hollinghurst calls it the line of beauty. It’s use here, though, is terrible. See that drainpipe on the left, reaching the roof at the bottom of the curve? That’s because that’s where the precipitation will collect. That drain gets blocked, they’ve got a leaky roof. But – more importantly – it looks like a the building’s just starting down the road to a comb-over. Not best. But dear old Hanover loved this feature so much, they used it as a motif!

Check out those delightful wavy railings! How quaint! And they’re not just on that penthouse suite, they’re all around the property.

I love old folk and I truly hope that the people who live in these flats can cherish them and delight in their new homes. But surely we can do better than this. Surely the old folk of Brighton can have somewhere modern and safe and comfortable to live that is also at least attractive to look at. Unlike the good people at Hanover, I think age and beauty can share the same space.

PCC

Anyone else noticed how slow the PCC website is at this precise moment (17:46 16.10.2009)? I wonder why that could be…

Manhattan in Words & Pictures

Hey everyone,

So this is really just me spreading an advert over the interweb. Yeah, yeah, I’m a shmuck. But it’ll put a smile on your face, particularly if you happen to be as enamoured of Manhattan as me and Nurse Kimber the Red.

Click here to view, the link to the vid is at the top right of the screen. It takes a while to load but it’s very clever.

And whilst we’re on the subject of New York and advertising, I thought you might like to see this picture here. I took this while strolling along the High Line with my aunt. I’d been fiddling around with my NY photos in HP Photosmart Premier (I’m waaaaay too cheap for photoshop) as some were a bit overexposed and I played around with this one too. I flatter myself (a not uncommon occurrence) to say that I think it looks like a classy 60s advert.

UPDATE: Etiquette, Cinnamon, etiquette! I, of course, should and do now tip my hat to the excellent Mister Aegir Hallmundur of the MoT.

Split Peds in Dubrovnik

There’s a tendency toward the Baroque in Dubrovnik and they really know how to split their pediments.

They stick three of them together, round a corner:

Not enough for you? Want four in a row, preferably topping out some engaged ionic columns? Fine.

Fancy, eh? Well – not as fancy as this. This is proper Baroque – an angel of some variety, lots of thick swirly bits, and a beautifully broken pediment:

Entertainment

I make no apologies for once again speaking of Mr Michael Chabon and quoting him at length. It turns out that I hadn’t actually read everything he’s written and published (although I believe I soon will have. Get me) and, whilst moseying about in The Strand bookstore I found a paperback copy of some collected essays of his. The first essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights”, begins as follows:

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsickle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation.

Naturally MC goes on to debunk this and argues for a restoration of entertainment – specifically in the form of the short story – to what he sees as its hallowed place.

This morning I read an interesting piece in the Graun, following the Royal Ballet’s tour of Cuba (Carlos Acosta’s fine presence in said company playing no doubt some part in said arrangement). You should read it too, if you have an interest in ballet or Cuba (“Aw, shucks. Tap and Bolivia – that’s all I care about. What a gosh darned shame”). These sorts of pieces, I find, tend to end with some concluding thought – like Jerry Springer – and usually it’s some platitude masquerading as profundity. Not this time:

Sitting above Havana, gazing over a city slowly being rebuilt, [Edward] Watson [one of the RB's principle dancers] suggests that back in Britain the link between dance and reality has become tragically worn, that in our wealth we’ve lost the understanding of what a tour like this should mean. “Here, people come to be entertained,” he tells me. “In London, too many come to criticise, to form their opinions, but here they just come for a good time.”

To form their opinions… There’s a phrase. The challenge, then: to allow oneself to be entertained, to revel in and celebrate art; to admit and incorporate one’s ignorance; to shrink from the quick opinion; to forgo the easy lament of one’s own inadequacies and to cheer the fine, hard work of the creator and the performer and the stagehand.

Saw these guys yesterday doing this. They were brilliant.

102

This is what happens when I leave the country. Sheesh.

Coming to you LIVE AND HOT from the East Vill

Hello fair readers both! And mainly, you’ll be thrilled to hear, I’m sunning it up in NYC – East Sixth, to be fairly precise. What a treat! Sorry about the lack of a teaser but I didn’t want to give any game away to my fair Aunt, who has just celebrated a certain milestone of agedness and whom I was surprising with my visit. Anyway, it’s lovely here, as always, and I’ve enjoyed such architectural delights as the (nearly finished) new Cooper Union building and the demi-centurian Guggenheim. Pictures will be forthcoming just as soon as I can get the camera to plug into the computer and do the transferral and such.

In the meantime, I would very much like to talk about the PM. Oh cripes, he’s dreadful. Can’t string a sentence together, can’t even think properly. No ideas that man. Heartless, uncompassionate, unfunny. He’s a walking disaster.  Clarkson has it spot on. We might as well have elected (or rather not elected) a walrus with tusk-ache. Etc. Oh, hang on…

So OK. I don’t agree with everything he says (I’m not so much a passionate advocate for global organisations) but this video goes to show that there’s more to GB than we’re getting. I don’t claim to be an expert on the matter, but I suspect that there’s a fascinating essay to be written on how this Premier came to be seen as such a rotten failure. Here we have a decent speaker, with interesting, well-presented ideas; yet what we get on our screens is a useless dullard. Where did this come from? Whilst GB can’t escape responsibility, surely we must look to the peculiarities of our media and the wider political landscape for a full explanation. But I think we also must try to understand how we’ve come to a point in our national politics where listening to this sort of speech from (arguably) the most powerful man in the land becomes far, far less important than arguing over the ex-Home Secretary’s plugs and porn movies.

Anyway, that’s today’s ranting lament over. Now I’m going to listen to Seth MacFarlane at the Proms. I could literally not have any more of my boxes ticked right now.

Much love,

RTC

On the Rise and Fall of Men’s Trousers

The trouser, like almost the entirety of Western Civilisation as we know it, can be blamed squarely on the shoulders – or, more accurately in this case, hips – of Mr Beau Brummel. His dandyish wearing of the trouser, as opposed to the foppish breeches, was a complex challenge to the sartorial niceties of the time – a theme we shall see reappearing in this discussion. Beau (we’re on first name terms these days) was at once the best- and worst-dressed man of his age. If you were a very rich young man whose steadily increasing waistline necessitated regular visits by the tailor, whose dad was presumed to be going mad and who would one day be King, then you would have considered Beau to be the most astonishingly attired and beautiful of men. If you were that young man’s father, you would have pinned on Beau the imminent ruin of society.

Despite the connotations that the word has aquired today, the late Eighteenth Century dandy was not over-dressed or feminine. Inherent in Dandyism was a tendency toward a fine, simple, almost utilitarian way of dressing. It is true that the dandy would take great pains over his wardrobe, that hours spent dressing was a symbol of great pride for the dandy, but – compared to the wigs and powder and rouge and stockings and buckles and brockade and jewellery of the fop – the dandy was a refined and sleek gentleman. And, in challenging the Baroque opulence of his forbears, Beau was setting himself very deliberately apart from this very normal cornucopia of blazing riches whilst enjoying the hallowed attentions of the Prince of Wales and our Lord Byron. His trousers were a scandal. And an astonishing success.