Gavin Stamp's new book, Britain's Lost Cities, is one of the most depressing architectural monographs ever published. Page after page of monochrome photography charts the combined destructive effects of Blitz and town-planning, as medieval, Georgian and Victorian structures were ripped apart in the name of war or progress (or a combination of both, as planners used German bombs to help facilitate the grand visions dreamt up in the 1930s). Stamp's book recalls Hermione Hobhouse's classic Lost London, a heart-rending compilation of architectural violence against the city, from the loss of Sir John Soane's original Bank of England (its ruination foreseen by Joseph Gandy) to the absurdly petty-minded destruction of the Euston Arch (still a grand symbol of the importance of having a strong conservation movement). More at London Destruction. Related, unbuilt London, an occasional collection of schemes that fell by the wayside.

The picture at the top shows the south side of Brunswick Square, before the arrival of the Brunswick Centre and the architectural excesses of London University. The Centre has now been refurbished and scrubbed up and is rather schizophrenically celebrated as both Brunswick (!), a glossy street of boutiques and big-name brands, and the gritty, modernist megastructure that was originally envisioned. City of Sound captured the place mid-gentrification, and it's safe to say that Patrick Hodgkinson's scheme has now largely overcome the antipathy it received for being responsible for so much demolition.

But like the terrace in Abingdon Street illustrated below, these records mark the loss of not just houses or architecture, but place. Abingdon Street was a distinguished line of Georgian houses along the edge of Old Palace Yard, just north of the Houses of Parliament. Damaged during the war, they were removed in 1943 for the erection of the George V memorial - and now form the spot where TV crews do their piece to camera. These are heartfelt losses, clumps of cityscape and memory that can never be replaced, only replicated, without patina or proportion. So much of the city has been bludgeoned into open space, or lost forever beneath squat blocks whose meandering footprints have no time for ancient street patterns. The other day we watched a pavement being laid, with the surface cut deep to expose pipes and cables, roots and raw earth. Amongst them all was the unmistakable curve of a barrel vault, the last remnants of a long lost streetscape, soon to be covered over once more.



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Other things. The Futurists would have loved YouTube, with its swift delivery of pornographic violence, cut, spliced and soundtracked, served up in little two minute chunks of mechanised, balletic carnage. It's a sign of the times that we'd think of YouTube while reading Ghost in the Machine, a dissertation by Michael Heumann on 'Sound and Technology in Twentieth Century Literature', which covers the Futurists' splenetic, frezied sound experiments. Related, Halvorsen's Blogariddims 31, 'one hour of straightforward avant-garde electronic goodies, treated and non-treated voices, some phonography, computer code noise and the old pause signal from the Norwegian radio'.

Also related, a question: Would current technology allow someone to make an audio recording of their life?. According to Heumann, Thomas Edison spent time exploring the sonic landscape of life after death, talking to the New York Times about 'his interest in building a hyper-sensitive microphone which would be able to capture and store these "life units" as they leave a dying body–thereby extending the notion of recording beyond material sound and into the registers of spirits and energy'.

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A chaotic collection of books, links nicely to BLDG BLOG's musings on the new British library archive centre, and this recent piece on The Space of the Book, focusing on a theatrical, Umberto Eco-like space in a church in Maastricht. By placing the book at the heart of the house, you get interesting architectural oddities like the late Simon Ungers' T-House in New York State, or OMA's Maison a Bordeaux (1998), with its central core of knowledge accessed via an industrial paternoster platform.

A flickr set of serious colours / small drawings, a weblog / Honey Pot, a blog of baking and fine recipes / Kids on Roof, complex play structures / the Government Art Collection / the Yenidze building in Dresden, a former cigarette factory and a bold architectural statement. More at flickr and skyscraper city / Curiously Incongruous, London everyday (via Coudal) / little modernist birdboxes by Raumhochrosen / the Tate extension takes another step towards commencement / all about the Lewisham Train Disaster of 1957. See also the official report (link to pdf).



Disassembling Old Magazines To Sell On eBay - A Mini Case Study, one of the origins of our ephemera overload / a gallery of work by Vladimir Ossipoff, Hawaiian architect extraordinaire / a one-off Buckminster Fuller Chandelier / the Amazon filler item finder, scour for bargains / tales of Old China / Historical Maps of Europe / a flickr set of Penguin books / the future is increasingly being shaped by our memories of the past (see Collective Perception, and its homepage of dazzling but strangely familiar imagery) / and what a past: Ken: the man behind the doll / a short (textual) history of CGI in film / The Schimmel Piano, the latest project from Daniel Libeskind.

Labels: architecture, London

posted by things at 14:59