I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.
(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)
Day two of Postopolis! LA. I now have a fingernail grip on the city, and the place is increasingly growing on me.
My friend Ben Cerveny took me for a drive around LA, not consciously trying to recreate Reyner Banham Loves LA but certainly not a million miles away. We did note that we were following Banham’s directive to “read it in the original” by driving, and in a convertible too.
Huge thanks to Ben for an amazing tour, with his DVD commentary turned on, of Downtown, along Wilshire Boulevard through a trace of Koreatown and Macarthur Park, La Brea, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, up into the hills and the Griffith Park Observatory, and down to Silverlake and Echo Park. While LA is clearly too vast and complex to comprehend in a few days, it is possible to begin to understand it through exploring, and in direct contrast to my usual and preferred way of exploring cities on foot, driving is the way to do it, at least initially.
Indeed Wilshire is essentially the first street in the world to be purposely designed to be understood from the car. The shift from Downtown through Wilshire Boulevard is particularly fascinating, as the ‘30s era deco shifts down the gears. Downtown is almost preserved - as LA had other centres to develop, its original downtown didn’t get turned over as most did - as are huge chunks of Wilshire, at least in form. The shift from Koreatown to Latino LA fascinating, particularly via the white enclaves of Beverly Hills.One thing is that the streets are bustling in the former, whereas no-one (save the odd housekeeper) is visible on the vast manicured streets of the latter.
There are too many reflections to write about here, and many that will fully form later. Equally I wouldn’t want this to become another wearisome tale of A European ‘discovers’ LA (akin to its contemporary companion, A Westerner ‘discovers’ China.) But let me jot down a few thoughts.
The constant reinvention is discernible in the architecture, at all scales and styles. In the richer parts of town - massive straight roads scored with giant palms, where each house is the size of a hotel - it’s a riot of architectural play. Taste has no place here. A crossroads with replica Tudorbethan on one corner, a replica French mansion on another, with a replica Spanish villa facing them. In a slightly lower-rent area before this (“Central LA”?) it’s denser, but equally odd. Apartment blocks with faux turrets etc. Some very odd buildings here, and yes, all perhaps a manifestation of the drive for reinvention. It’s complex. I remark to Ben that I feel like burning most of it down but having lovingly documented it first. Again, the contradictions. The irony is drenching everything at this point though, at least to the observer, and that’s not healthy. We can see why this side of LA appeals to architectural theorists and urbanists, but only as a preserved petri dish laced with irony. It’s fascinating and appalling.
I realise Australia is like America without the drive and ambition, perhaps. It doesn’t have this sense of invention, no matter how misplaced it is on occasion. The other difference is the obvious density of LA. Not in Beverly Hills perhaps, but everywhere else. Areas which would be quarter-acre blocks in Australia are apartment blocks here. There are few Sydney and Melbourne-style terraces, and obviously no European-style ones, but the pattern is dense nonetheless. Later districts in the tour, like Silverlake and Echo Park, are very tightly wound. In Brisbane, an obvious parallel given the same contours laden with small hoisted houses jutting out of tree-covered hills, these buildings would be on much larger plots of land, separated, and larger structures (a strange Australian quirk, as if inspired by the vastness of the island-continent, irrespective of the fact that the actual usable, liveable post-colonial Australian landscape is relatively small.) In Silverlake and Echo Park, say, they’re jostling next to each other, but quite beautifully. Jeffrey Inaba, in his talk the previous night, posited that LA is in fact the densest city in the country. LA, it turns out, is not only good urban form in terms of being poly-nodal, but also density. These are further contradictions in terms of LA, where its ‘traditional’ image has been of an irregular, uncontrollable sprawl, ill-suited to the future. It turns out it’s not that simple, and many medium to large cities are now trying to emulate this poly-nodal organisation, and attain density.
Even here though, this notion of density is complex, and possibly more than Inaba realises. See Kraal vs. McDonald 2008, parts one, two and three. This, from Robert McDonald:
“The “average” house in LA is in a neighborhood of 10-15 homes/ha; 20% of houses fall in this category. The “average” housing unit in NY is in a neighborhood with more than 80 homes/ha; 27% of homes fall in this category. This kind of statistic becomes extremely important when considering the feasibility of mass transit, which (for light rail) works well above 40 homes/ha. Only 8% of houses are in such a neighborhood in LA, versus 32.6% of houses for NY. Even better, this way of measuring density is relatively insensitive to changes in the boundaries of the urban region. To return to the “myth” of LA being denser than NY, there is some truth to it. The newer (far) suburbs of New York are indeed less dense than those in LA. LA has fewer really low density suburbs, and fewer high density neighborhoods. NY has some really low density suburbs, and some really high density neighborhoods.”
Ben points out that the shift from Beverly Hills to Hollywood is palpable and abrupt, visible over one crossroads. The trees and houses of the former instantly replaced by shiny malls and large, crumbling ‘30s buildings of the latter. The mall in Hollywood actually features the re-used materials of Cecil B. Mille’s Babylon, somewhat incredibly. Equally remarkably, it is virtually ‘transit-oriented development’ in its incorporation of a good Metro line. Almost. It is surrounded by a fair bit of Scientology infrastructure too though. Moving on, we stop at a great row of shops on Franklin Avenue, and take coffee at the Bourgeois Pig. (Why do Americans say ‘booo-jwah’? Rhetorical.) It’s a great coffee shop, a dark enclave after the bright street (as Australian ones often are - a cave-like interior is often a valid strategy in places like California and Queensland.) And this is a great little strip of stores: independent book-shops, record-shops etc. The kind of diversity, character and quality that malls can never reproduce (not that they aspire to).
The Griffith Park Observatory is a simply wonderful space, as many of you will know, perched atop scrubby hills that now remind me of New South Wales. In fact the eucalypts - also early migrants to California - are doing very well, by all accounts. But the terrain and soil is subtly different, and the vegetation - minus the eucalypts - completely different of course. LA is spread out before us in all directions, though it’s a hazy day, a combination of fog and smog fading the city out beyond Downtown. The ocean isn’t visible today - the vast flat plains of LA fill the eyes, eventually dissolving in mountains and sky as if a Qing dynasty-era painting. While the LA River can be seen snaking in from the left of our view, the city’s asphalt arteries sweep into the distance in dead straight lines.
Down to Silverlake and Echo Park. These are particularly appealing, with thousands of the aforementioned houses clinging to the hills. There’s a few particularly insane hills in Echo Park, where they imposed the grid irrespective the contours, following San Francisco’s lead. (San Francisco was bigger first and briefly an influence on LA, Ben relates). But most of the streets round here give up that game quite rightly, and instead wind up and around the hills in delightfully organic fashion. While there no pavements - and I usually take pavements to be an important offer to the citizen - here the traffic is so slow-moving due to the curves and narrow roads that it’s possible to walk anyway. With a few soft infrastructure tweaks and some more evenly distributed amenities, it would be very walkable.
One particular image is etched on my mind: an elderly Korean or Chinese woman on the crest of a hill, moving very slowly and staring into the middle distance of the opposite hill, doing what looked like tai chi. This, just after we’d inched past the beginnings of a Latino barbecue, a complex affair spilling out onto the street. We then drive past a few Neutra and Schindler houses. To my subsequent eternal regret my memory card filled just as we got to these neighbourhoods. My actual memory of them will persist fondly though.
By the time we’re back in Downtown, the traffic is building up and Broadway is a chaotic, honking mess of slow-moving steel. By this time, though, the city has won me over. Its constant contradictions - the very contradiction of it being here in the first place - have little negative effect now, only continually beguiling. Despite everything, this city continues to grow. As the Carey McWilliams poem from 1946 says:
”Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano”
You still sense that, now as much as ever.
Before moving on to the more challenging approaches to architecture and urbanism that Postopolis! Is predicated on, it’s clear that even amongst this melange of vernacular architecture, beautiful Case Study Homes and professionalised eruptions of poor taste in the mansions of Beverly Hills, that experimentation and invention is at the heart of Los Angeles. But it’s a form of individual experimentation, in this case by householders. And even where I’ve discussed civic buildings like Walt Disney Concert Hall, Caltrans etc., you’ll note that they essentially stand alone, disconnected - atop a hill, or surrounded by parking lots or development sites. The only parts of Downtown that feel connected and coherent are Broadway and the Historic Core, unchanged in form since the ‘30s and unified through the accreation of shared history. But this individualism is at the heart of Los Angeles, as Hitoshi Abe, Chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, noted in his preface to a recent edition of A+U on the city's design and architecture:
“In different ways from Tokyo or Shanghai, Los Anglees is a city receptive to and actively nourishing many architectural experiments. The pursuit of explorations is evident across a broad spectrum. It can be found in kitsch roadside buildings, efforts by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra, the trials of Case Study Houses, John Lautner’s activities, and the work of contemporaries such as Frank O. Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss.”
“Experimentation emerges from the city as a site of extreme individualism. In this sense experimentation in Los Angeles is about self-reflection and independent individuals striving to extend their own capabilities and the limits of possibilities. Individual pursuits are subsequently tested within the larger context of society. Today, globalization and interconnectivity are transforming the meaning of individuals, and consequently change the meaning of experimentation in Los Angeles.” (A+U #455: ‘The New Ecologies in Los Angeles - Design and Technology’)
That’s discernible in many of the projects we see at Postopolis! - In fact, some of the participants feature in that edition of A+U, such as Ball-Nogues. Others, such as Ben Cerveny, are looking at information systems that interconnect individuals to form a kind of social substrate for civic experimentation, not quite as Abe imagined but certainly exploring this idea of a civic glue “transforming the meaning of individuals” in cities like LA nonetheless.
Later that (Wednesday) evening, Bryan Finoki, Ben and I go for quick drive around LA Live, whose floodlights have been polluting the sky behind us every night. It’s not good, this place. A massive development which feels entirely out of step with the times. It should’ve been out of step with the city at any time, to be honest, but right now it feels particularly bloated, brash and broken. The so-called public space is crudely articulated such that there are no places to sit down or hang out, and over-lit to the point of absurdity. The laughable attempt at a piazza in front of the Nokia Forum is entirely empty as a result. It’s not in these disconnected mega-developments that Los Angeles will continue to experiment and connect but elsewhere, diffused amidst the distributed metropolis.
To Postopolis day two.
There are fewer people here initially tonight, though it fills up later, and by 7.30 the rooftop is full, so thanks again. It’s a bit warmer tonight, though the wind gets up later. The wind is a function of the design of the buildings around us, as if to rub in the themes of Postopolis! We sit 15 storeys up in a wind tunnel generated by the skyscrapers, such that a conference on landscape, architecture and urbanism is being slowly frozen by the city’s landscape and architecture itself.
The BLDGBLOG-powered Twitter feed for Postopolis! LA is going gangbusters. It’s a fantastic record of events, actually, whether you’re following in real-time or browsing retrospectively.
Tonight’s presentations are excellent. Geoff and I had noted that day one occasionally felt a bit tepid - great in parts, but a lack of energy in others - but day two really comes alive. A great variety to the talks, with stand-outs for me being the historian David Gissen, Robert Miles of Variate Labs and writer and photographer (and Morphosis architect) Ted Kane of Polar Inertia. Geoff runs a little interstitial interview with Jace and Joseph, during a break, which works quite well.
We now have lights, so the speakers are visible after dark, the Storefront crew improvising brilliantly as ever. Before that, early evening, the smell of dope drifts across from the hotel swimming pool behind us during Whitney Sander’s presentation, pausing proceedings temporarily.
I’m not sure I’ve pointed out quite how spectacular the skypscapers around us look. Oddly, they’re not as present during the day, as your eyes instead drift to the hills in the background. Yet at night, with the lights on (rather too many lights on), they almost close in around the rooftop, creating a kind of canopy. There are more planes overhead tonight, for some reason, and a few helicopters later, the sound of their blades bouncing off the skyscrapers around us.
I'd long ago decided to try to deliver constructive criticism with this site. So in discussing the ideas for 'distributed exhibitions' in the previous review of the 'Modern Times' exhibition at the Powerhouse, I decided to try to make an example of what I meant.
The simplest possible offering that still illustrates the point would be a Google Map of 'modernism in Australia' - an artefact that lives outside the exhibition, guiding people to examples of the work that exist outside the exhbition. So I started a map, dragged a few blue markers into place, and then enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help me kickstart it.
But within a week, we'd got a pretty good set of examples - over 180 buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images (and we've tried to credit images where possible.) Houses, skyscrapers, civic buildings, sculptures, memorials. (And we didn't want to get into a debate of what formally counted as modernism and what didn't - inclusivity was the order of the day. Having said that, if you think there's a property that shouldn't be listed there, for whatever reason, do let me know.)
It's a little skewed towards the south and east, to say the least - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, to be precise. We're hoping to rectify that, with your help. We need contributions for the other major cities in Australia, and I've decided to take a curatorial approach rather than fully open, given the hard work put in by others thus far and the lack of back-up/roll-back facilitites in Google Maps. So if you want to join in, and if you know of examples of modernism in built form - buildings, sculptures, infrastructure, built or unbuilt - drop me a line (email address below-right, where it says 'email me') and I'll happily welcome you in.
In the meantime, we hope you find the map useful, interesting. It's embedded below, though you might find this direct link more useful. I'll also send it to the Powerhouse Museum, offering it up as a potential adjunct to their exhibition, if they're interested.
The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.
The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)
While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.
“Scholars of this material generally subscribe that the use of a system of ‘module and mass production’ accounts for the diversity. The phrase was coined by the German art historian Lothar Ledderose in 2000, when he used it as the subtitle of his book, which had an image of the Terracotta Army on its cover and contained a compelling thesis about the distinctive nature of creativity in China. Most commentators have picked up on the mass-produced nature of the figures; a display case in the exhibition shows a modern reconstruction in little clay figures of the production line. It is modelled in the style of the Socialist Realist sculpture that was used in Mao’s day to generate such vast agitprop dioramas of life-size figures as Rent Collection Courtyard (portraying the ways of pre-1949 ‘evil landlords’) or Wrath of the Serfs (portraying the ‘evil ways’ of the pre-1949 Tibetan monastic establishment). The point is not just mass production but the mass production of modular forms – three types of plinth, two types of leg set, eight types of torso and so on – which can be combined and recombined and combined again into a simulacrum of diversity. This is not so much mass production in the sense of the Industrial Revolution as in the sense in which it is deployed by Starbucks, where everyone can think they are getting just what they want.”
“Ledderose’s analysis of module and mass production in Chinese culture extends across a range of phenomena, one of them being the Chinese script, where again a relatively small number of modules can be combined to generate forms running into tens of thousands. The contemporary artist Xu Bing used the same principles to generate thousands of unreadable characters in A Book from the Sky of 1987-91.”
(An account of a house-visit to a modernist classic, with reflections on the importance of clients who know what they want, and can express it in terms that increasingly make sense 40 years later, and the results of a Melbourne architect working in Sydney.)
A couple of months ago, the Trimbles and I drove down to the south of Sydney to see the Lyons House. Designed by the great Robin Boyd in 1966, it's a wonderful house, and still inhabited by the original owner, Dr. Lyons, some 40 years on.
After Boyd died young, aged only 52 in 1971, Joseph Burke said he was "the artistic conscience of his country, in the future of which he believed passionately." That gives a sense of his importance as an architect - particularly in practice with Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg - but also as an influential writer and critic (I’ve mentioned his influential ‘The Australian Ugliness’ before, but more influential were his weekly columns for The Age, work for the Small Homes Serviceand his book 'Australia's House'.) This, however, was the first Boyd house I'd experienced in the flesh.
The Lyons House is essentially unchanged, functioning beautifully and well-cared for. It’s a great example of a form of mid- to late-century modernism, and still stands out in its environment as brave, progressive and thoughtful architecture. The access was arranged by Nic Dowse, organiser of the Boyd Homes Group, and we joined a group of around 10-15 Boyd home owners (lucky devils), fans or folk otherwise interested in Boyd’s work or the architecture of that time. (I've put a full set of photos up on Flickr, though I have to say, it was a difficult building to capture.)
The sprightly Dr. Lyons described the house in intelligent detail, and in particular its commission and relationship with Boyd. This last aspect is particularly fascinating and Lyons himself indicated the value of a client who knew what he wanted in terms of function, and his good fortune in meeting a sympathetic architect at the top of his craft.
This is a handsome coffee table book. Literally. It's full of handsome houses with handsome coffee tables. Every house in this book of "iconic Australian houses" is indeed a corker, each defining a new take on a regional modernism. Like Australia itself the architecture is influenced by Europe, America, Asia and filtered through its own indigenous cultures, powerful climate and terrain to produce something novel and distinctive.
The European influence is all continental, leaving contemporary Australia's British heritage well behind generally a good idea when it comes to aesthetics.) Architects like Harry Seidler are direct European injections; others draw from a form of humanist or organic modernism perhaps in common with Aalto and Saarinen. The American influence is Californian, just as the climate in Australia's south-east is similar, and the Case Study Houses were all absorbed, but the principal influence is probably that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Asian architecture is evident in the vernacular forms of Pacific architecture, particularly in Queensland, but again principally from Japanese architecture.
The writer, Karen McCartney, points out the latter in her introduction:
"Many attributes of Japanese architecture have been adopted for use in Australian domestic architecture: the tradition for post and beam construction; extensive use of wood and the exposure of the structural elements; sliding screens for flexible floor plans; changes in internal levels; framed garden views and the linking of internal and external space."
This, then, appears to have been a new architecture of both sides of the Pacific, a wave of European emigrés developing work in Australia and California, increasingly influenced by the combination of Japanese and indigenous, climactically-sensitive architecture, until a new form emerges.
It's fascinating to watch the work develop, from Seidler's Rose Seidler House in 1950 - a quietly revolutionary marker for a new way of thinking - through to the fibreglass capsule house of Ian Collins in 1974. Some houses seem responses to previous statements, widening the range of possibilities within this regional modernism, with the opening salvo of Seidler cleverly followed by Peter Muller's Audette House. Muller's house appeared to sidestep Seidler's International Style by developing an alternative way forward, dissolving into the landscape in a low-lying organic form, with local materials and references subsumed into entirely modern thinking and practice.
McCartney reveals how Seidler - forever playing Roark star - said at the time, "Does not this (organic) architecture seem rather weak, subservient and not very proud of itself?". She asked Peter Muller recently about Seidler's quote, and Muller's response, in email, is fascinating:
"Seidler was pushing for international architecture which abnegated all concerns to preserve local diversity. The climatic, geographic, cultural and spiritual integrity, and deeper meanings for ornament were regarded as some kind of superstition. So-called organic architecture was regarded as 'romantic' and intuitive, rather than intelligent and no match for what the Brave New World had to offer with its high-tech, machine-driven materials. Today, of course, with concerns for global warming, fossil fuels and so on, emphasis shifts once again and the use of natural and sustainable materials in an intelligent and sensible way to reduce energy overloads is considered admirable and strong-minded. Pride comes before a fall, subservience to Truth is a blessing and the weak shall inherit the earth."
These fierce differences of opinion, sometimes expressed in letters by the more vocal protagonists, other times in concrete, brick and wood, bounce back and forth across the projects gathered here. Yet from today's distance, the houses appear to have more in common than difference.
The work is breathtakingly beautiful, each house a gem amidst the banal Australian outer suburban architecture excoriated by Boyd in his book The Australian Ugliness (a charge recently reiterated by Elizabeth Farrelly in her book Blubberland). This contrast, if you know it, further highlights the importance of this work. The level of quality in the build, as well as the integration with the landscape, look to be of the highest order and should still be aspired to.
Yet despite some of these houses being on generous plots, and photographed as if majestically standing alone in the terrain, there's a starker comparison with today, also made clear in McCartney's introduction.
There was a restriction on plot size post-WWII of 134m² and the lifting of that, combined with the new prosperity of the '50s and '60s, enabled many of the houses here to flourish. Yet most are still essentially modest propositions, with generally small bathrooms and bedrooms. The general consensus was that bathrooms should be like toilets - small, functional and not places to hang around. Ditto bedrooms are often small-ish, with a greater emphasis on the shared living spaces. This in contrast to today's houses, which are 264m² on average and, as McCartney notes, 600m² not unheard of. These larger houses, today's private commissions, feature 3 or 4 bathrooms, mostly en-suite, as well as media rooms, in-house gyms and swimming pools. Few if any of the houses in 50/60/70 have pools, and even Buhrich's famous lipstick red fibreglass bathroom - with construction inspired by boatbuilding techniques - is relatively discreet compared to today's faux-Roman monstrosities.
Of course, many houses here are built by architects for themselves, with the other half private commissions from clients apparently well-versed aesthetically. A wander - or more realistically, a drive - around Sydney and Melbourne's suburbs will tell us that many terrible houses were built at the time, blissfully unaware of this fabulous work.
Yet while the houses in 50/60/70 are in no way high-density living - Boyd noted that "it was said that flats were for foreigners" - many here are modest, and highly sympathetic to context. We could do well to learn again from building modest houses, for I hope obvious reasons. There are enough clues here as to how to do it. (And we'd also do well to look to our Japanese neighbours again to learn how to build truly high-density dwelling of quality, suiting urban context as well as 'natural'. On that count, seeing as Australia can be thought of a nation of foreigners, perhaps Boyd's quote RE flats can be reconfigured as an optimistic one.)
The houses featured here are by (in chronological order) Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Roy Grounds, Peter McIntyre, Russell Jack, Robin Boyd, David McGlashan and Neil Everist, Enrico Taglietti, Neville Gruzman, Bruce Rickard, Hugh Buhrich, Ian McKay, Iwan Iwanoff, John Kenny and Ian Collins.
Personal favourites here? From the Melbourne masters who fell out: the wonderfully simple 1954 house of Roy Grounds and Robin Boyd's Walsh Street House of 1958. Plus, John Kenny's 1976 house, as an attempt at a modular, sustainable, late-period Case Study House, is laden with useful thinking. Though a better authority, architect Peter Myers, said that Hugh Buhrich's Buhrich House II, in Sydney's famous Castlecrag, is "easily the best modern house in Australia." The quality of all the projects here is incredibly high.
Victoria's reputation emerges from this period, and has been documented many times, but it's the work of 'the Sydney School' throughout NSW that is particularly well represented here. (There are few other non-Syd/Melb examples: a Taglietti in Canberra, an Iwanoff house in Perth, and nothing from Queensland save a few mentions of Hayes and Scott. Perhaps an oversight.)
The book contributes good if small plans for the houses, and all projects been beautifully photographed, with each house followed by a series of details which look at individual elements of construction or furnishing. Indeed, as you might expect from McCartney, an editor of interior design magazine, the furnishing is a key facet of this book. Houses were included on the basis that "the interior furnishings ... were stylistically sympathetic, if not original." Some great houses, such as Boyd's Lyons House (1968) - which in being a Sydney house by a Melbourne architect almost exemplifies many of the themes here - would have been ruled out by those criteria, but I can see why it's been done. The book works as a sourcebook for mid-century modern furniture of the highest order too.
This book won't have the erudition, breadth of reference or insight of Philip Goad's New Directions in Australian Architecture, several others by Goad, or Boyd's books for that matter. Largely as it makes more space for photographs, which are beautifully shot and well reproduced, rather than text. But it sits alongside those books as a finely curated collection of exemplary architecture, amongst the finest examples of houses anywhere, and many examples here provide potent, rich visions of the heights domestic architecture can reach when emphasising quality and modesty.
(More pictures below. Click on any image to see a larger version at Flickr. And many thanks to Celia for giving me this book.)
50/60/70: Iconic Australian Houses, by Karen McCartney [Amazon UK|US]
There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.
Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.
Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.
But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.
I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)
But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto, described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)
Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.
It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian'sJonathan Glancey.)
Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?
“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”
“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”
“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.
When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of ‘community’ there nonetheless.)
I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.
“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”
Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)
Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.
I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations, leaving aside broader concerns over 'regeneration'. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)
Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.
Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.
Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.
It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.
Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.
“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”
He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:
“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”
Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to - rather than any inherent piggery.
Bayley continues:
“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”
Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.
First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:
“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”
You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.
Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.
I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.
Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.
Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.
So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.
Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:
Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.
After a hiatus, Princeton Architectural Press have re-started Materials Monthly, in their words the “popular, build-your-own materials library subscription service that delivers the latest in materials research, from our desks to yours.” And that it does.
I’ve had a chance to look over, and pore over, issue #11, based around the theme of ‘Modern Adaptations’, and cannot fail but to be very impressed with this unique publication. Arriving in a pleasingly chunky cardboard box, the package contains actual examples of the materials discussed, alongside some well-produced loose-leaf editorial discussing them and their use, in this case historical. The ability to pick up, touch, rub and generally explore the tactility of materials is surprisingly affecting. I’ve long been espousing the virtues of senses other than sight in terms of assessing the impact of the built environment, drawing heavily from the likes of Juhani Pallasmaa, Stephen Holl, Paul Schütze, Mirko Zardini etc., but here’s a publication that actually takes that idea and delivers a sensory experience.
In The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa discusses the relationship between touch, objects, memory, history and process - "The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsmen and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand … The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition … it is time turned into shape." He notes that "the skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter."
Indeed, despite only being fragments and samples, it is a revelation to feel the cool weight of the small block of pigmented structural glass, or the delight on peeling back the protective wrapper to stroke the small square of sharp, highly-polished prismatic stainless steel. This simple yet rewarding experience actually suggests that the series serves not only as a regular prompt for designers and builders, but almost as an oblique critique of the ocularcentric architectural press elsewhere.
Of course its target audience is really designers, builders and engineers, and the publication is tuned to that crowd accordingly, but you half-wonder what if other, more general magazines like Dwell, Monument, A+U, Architectural Review, Frame and Mark took this approach, perhaps as a multi-sensory special-edition every quarter.
But for now, you have to subscribe to Materials Monthly for that kind of experience. They say:
“Each issue now includes at least five material samples and spec sheets with mechanical and physical properties, life cycle analysis data, sourcing and manufacturing details, digital and prefab options, installation, maintenance, and preservation advice, and other important technical information.”
It’s well-designed for use, with pages in loose form to be bound later, and a coding system linking object to text and beyond that makes the information architect within twitch with glee (he doesn’t get out much these days, so you’ll forgive me.) Subscribing, you'd quickly build a fantastic collection of materials, and copious notes on their historial, and potential, use. With so much attention being paid to new materials - e.g. the Transmaterial series amongst others - but so little opportunity to genuinely sense them, Materials Monthly, and Princeton Architectural Press, deserve a lot of credit for this smartly realised service.
Ben Terrett asked me to jot down some thoughts on the way Archigram worked, as part of a piece he’s pulled together on them, Pentagram and Magnum (the other pieces written by Michael Bierut and Henrietta Thompson, so I’m in august company). The idea being that all these organisations were united in having interesting 'co-operative' structures that enabled creativity. (As well as all ending in ‘m’). So here’s my quick and glossy contribution, on how I understand Archigram’s organisation to have contributed to their creative success.
John Birmingham: Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney A fantastic read. Thoroughly subjective, impassioned, personal and slanderous. Well researched and hefty, but written with a light touch, it takes apart the Emerald City, revealing it to be both impossibly dark and essentially conservative. Along with The Fatal Shore and a few others, essential reading in terms of understanding the city. (*****)
Gary Hume: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque As with the Seattle Public Library book in this series from Actar, I've been poring over this over the last year, pulling details and insight into recent work. A good resource, well-produced. (*****)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap Clever yet eminently readable novel of modern Melbourne manners. Written with the devilishly compelling page-turnability of a good grown-up soap opera, it's also a smartly structured and beautifully nuanced depiction of contemporary Australian urban:suburban society, warts and all. (*****)
Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver Lovely evocation of late-'50s Melbourne suburb, and of the railways just before the heart was ripped out of them. Not just a warm nostalgic costume drama, but with rich atmosphere and complex themes rippling beneath the surface. (****)
Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel Hugely enjoyable, as ever. One of the finest British writers around. Not autobiography, but autobiography. Fiction, and non-fiction. Travel writing, and not travel writing. Hilarious and occasionally moving, learned and light, warm and bad-tempered, revelling in facile reactions and almost immeasurably deep. A mess of contradictions that establishes a coherent world-view. Which is a contradiction in itself, of course. Beautifully turned prose too, apparently effortless but almost certainly not. (*****)
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Amazingly, I'd never read this in linear fashion, from cover to cover, until recently. Quite brilliant, clearly, and written so well. With humility and grace, wit and candour, insight and experience. Although focused primarily on New York of the '70s, it's still essential. (*****)
David Peace: GB84 Not sure why it's taken me so long to read this, as I'm a big fan of David Peace's writing and this book is set in and around the early-80s Sheffield of my youth. But it was well worth the wait. Peace fictionalises the miners' strike, and the extraordinary events of 1983-85 as Britain teetered on the edge of large scale civil unrest. But it's only just fiction, no matter how brutal it seems. A brilliant evocation of the time, and a social fabric stretched taut to breaking point. (*****)
Cormac Mccarthy: The Road I don't recall being quite so affected by a book before. Absolutely extraordinary, particularly if you read within one day. It left me speechless, shattered and reflective. (*****)
Julianne Schultz (Editor): Griffith REVIEW 21: Hidden Queensland (Griffith Review) Very good issue. Although it pores over the same old ground again and again from numerous angles, it ultimately reveals a fascinating, multiperspectival portrait of a place. Beneath its becalmed, languid easy-going surface, QLD has the scars of an extraordinarily rich half-century of history; a set of stories and characters well drawn out here. (****)
Frank Duffy: Work and the City (Edge Futures Ser.) Excellent summary of issues around working environments by DEGW's Duffy - from numerous angles, taking in history and future. Very useful read, even if you sense there's much more to come here. (*****)
Models: 306090 11 (306090) Fantastic collection edited by Eric Ellingsen, covering all aspects of models as pertaining to designing the built environment. Digital and analogue in all modes, and philosophical and aesthetic considerations besides. (*****)
Monoliths and Dimensions Sunn 0))): Monoliths and Dimensions Ye Gods, the most startlingly beautiful thing I've heard for a long time. Absolutely stunning. They say: "the most musical piece we’ve done, and also the heaviest, powerful and most abstract set of chords we’ve laid to tape"." Features Eyvind Kang, Julian Priester (!), frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi and a Viennese choir. (*****)
SND: Atavism Brutal in its starkness, these ultra-precise, ultra-sparse clipped rhythms are the polar opposite of Sunn O))). (*****)
Filastine: Dirty Bomb Not every track works here but those that do are fantastic. A rich stew of jump-cut rhythms and Hispanic samples, framed by an architecture of R&B. (****)
Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2009 A few quite lovely tracks on here, generally those featuring the brilliant Klimek. Others are pretty enough but a little insubstantial. (****)
Flying Lotus: Los Angeles Beautiful fractured rhythms and smeared fizzing neon samples. Wondrous piece of work. LA, indeed. (*****)
Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light Luminous, shimmering, iridescent. Seriously, quite lovely. Only a couple of off-notes; otherwise, a major progression. (*****)
Balla et Ses Balladins: The Syliphone Years Wonderful Guinean dance music troupe from the early-60s, recording on the state-owned Syliphone label. Sparkling guitar lines in particular. (*****)
1897 Seaworthy: 1897 Recorded inside the Newington Armory heritage-listed arms depot in Sydney (built in 1897), and so redolent of cavernous reverberating chambers, this is full of lovely drones and fragments of picked guitar. Rather good. (****)
Coward Nels Cline: Coward Fabulous new solo album from 'Patsy'. Hanging around Wilco has informed things a little here, but elsewhere you can hear the influence Ralph Towner, Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Fennesz, Rod Poole, Bill Frisell etc etc. But it's Cline, above all, and he's certainly eased himself into that august company now. (*****)
Dance Mother Telepathe: Dance Mother Very saucy NYC art-pop. TV On The Radio-influenced (and indeed aided and abetted by TVOTR) but fresher, sharper. Beyond the studied hipness there's substance here too. [via Jace] (****)
Le Journaliste Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor: Le Journaliste Best record I've heard in ages. Impenetrable torrents of raw French over Moor's brutal guitar-led soundtracks. I heard this on DJ Rupture's show and was immediately intrigued. You will be too. (*****)
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