Do We Need Architects? by Alun Dolton

Beeching's Folly

Infrastructure: Stuff that nobody cares about until it affects them.

In the story of ‘Great’ Britain the railway as a communication system was exported all around the world, the question is: why would a nation that gave birth to the railway and build a vast integrated network over 100 years choose to destroy it? That is exactly what happened in the UK. At its height there were 120 railway companies operating in the UK, eventually that became 4 that were brought together under government control during WWII. After six years of being worked to destruction, they were in desperate need of renewal and the four companies were on the verge of bankruptcy.

The 1947 general election was a landslide for the Labour party, who set about an ambitious programme of social reform to rebuild the nation, these reforms included the creation of the welfare state, that National Health Service and the nationalization of much of the infrastructure, from power generation, manufacturing to transportation. In terms of transportation it was not just the railways that were nationalised, but road transport, docks and inland waterways along with the railways to create an integrated transport system.

In terms of what this has to do with architecture or urban planning, it is about the events that occur that are beyond the control of any planner, as is often the case in British politics, the Labour Party lost the next election to the Conservatives. With such an ambitious social reform and infrastructure programme, more than one term in government is needed to see the economic benefit of the policies being implemented.

The response was to commission a report under the chairmanship of British Railways, Dr. Richard Beeching, a much reviled figure in railway history and largely blamed for the decline of the nation. A scientist and engineer, not a railway operator and assessed the operation of the railways as an accountant, only looking at the income and expenditure over a three year period. The report takes no account of the investment made in the infrastructure, or the investments already committed based on the current network and demand. 

The report ‘The Reshaping of Britain’s Railways, recommended the closure of one third of the network simply because it was not profitable. The plan was implemented, and became known as the Beeching Axe, and the effects were devastating. Entire communities were cut off, , freight traffic decreased dramatically, and locomotive fleets that were newly built very quickly became redundant, some steam locomotives only seeing 5 years in service, some diesels only 8. Which when designed for 30 years of service, was bound not to pay for the cost of building them in the first place. 

As a result Locomotive works closed, depots, stations, hotels along with the supporting industries, placing countless men and women out of work. Unemployed. Not earning, not paying taxes, not contributing to the economy. The nation started a long cycle of decline. In terms of the urban fabric, railway stations became derelict, the tracks ripped up so the rails could be sold for scrap, dead zones appeared alongside railway cuttings that no longer carried trains, warehouses became disused, whole sections of the built environment suffered from decay. What this process demonstrates is that the social context was not understood by those making the decisions, Beeching,whose plan devastated the infrastructure of a nation and brought with it economic and social deprivation, whose sole purpose was to save money, seemingly unaware of the consequences. 

As the journey continues it explores some of these environments from 2015, where after decades of neglect, city centres are seeing a revival, as the strategies that were implemented following the Beeching Plan in some are being reversed at great expense. In urban terms this sequence demonstrates how short term cost cutting can cost far more in the long run and in terms of infrastructure planning, cost cutting is not an option, the investment needs to be made at the appropriate level and to plan for future growth with a degree of flexibility to responds to changing circumstances. 

Ongoing work on 'Is Architecture enough?' The follow up to 'Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture. ' Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris.

On the journey: 'Is Architecture Enough?'

Is Architecture Enough? 2017

In beginning to address the question the story explores some of the challenges facing the professions of Architecture, Urban Design and Planning. To some these are mutually exclusive fields, to others they are one and the same depending on the scale of the project. In reality it is all about developing what becomes the architecture of a place, and the recognition that each place is unique due to a number of factors that fall outside the realm of making buildings including climatic conditions and human behaviour specific to the region, meaning that what may work in one place is not necessarily transferable to another.

This is demonstrated in working on projects in Pakistan, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, as well as exploring places visited along the way. In many places it is the infrastructure that is being upgraded, considered by many to be outside the realm of architecture, until considering the impact that it has on the built environment and more importantly the impact that the lack of it has on the living environment. From exploring the Dubai Metro and new tram at the Dubai Marina, to London where the first tangible evidence of the world’s largest, probably most complex infrastructure project Crossrail, is becoming part of the public realm. Birmingham undergoing significant change, Manchester is in a similar state as public transport infrastructure is being upgraded in the city centre.

In terms of the notion of the master plan, Liverpool is experienced for the first time, where recent trends have been reversed to create a vibrant city centre. Bahrain is continuing to evolve as more elements of the masterplan set out in 2030 vision emerge from the sand. The start of the journey is reassessed in my home town on the English Riviera now being viewed not through the eyes of a child growing up in the town, but after being involved in significant urban development projects and viewing as an not only as an architect, but as an urban designer and planner, giving a view of the impact that planning strategies and government policy can have on a place, emphasising that in many cases the big decisions have been made before designers get involved in the process. Some of these can be national or regional strategies, some can be client decisions associated with land ownership such as site location for a proposed project, in many cases the project is part of a master plan developed by others that is ongoing and many of the opportunities to maximise the potential positive environmental impact of a project have already gone.

So what can we do? In university or Architecture School, a large component of the project is about how we respond to context and how we address issues associated with that context. In the real world that context can be determined by property developers whose sole aim of a projects is about building to make money. The problem with this is that many of our clients are those very people. Some architects talk about working with enlightened clients but we cannot all be so lucky.

Ongoing  work on 'Is Architecture enough?' The follow up to 'Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture. ' Available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris.

Treating Consumption

As Architects, Urban designers, Planners we are often handed a land use budget developed by the client who is invariably a property developer whose interest is limited to the sale of land plots to make money. Here is the manifestation of the notion of society living following the ‘business as usual ‘scenario and the consequences of business as usual being ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’.

The question is who are we designing for? Property developers or the people who are going to live in the developments? Many would have us believe that it is the property developers and not the end users, although it is the end users that we have a responsibility to accommodate in our schemes. Part of the problem is that when projects are developer led, the elements most easy to sell are prioritised, with less attention being given to the facilities that are required by the community, in short, the stuff that nobody cares about until they need it, or more accurately elements of the urban plan that developers would avoid paying for if they could.

There are a number of essential services provided through local and regional healthcare facilities, such as antenatal care, care for the elderly, treatment of trauma, but there is also a large proportion of healthcare spending that is expended on dealing with the consequences of living the consumer lifestyle.

Many healthcare facilities have obesity clinics, to deal with the consequences of overconsumption, and reduced mobility due to availability of fast food and reliance on the car to get around. Coupled with this is dealing with addiction, to drugs, both legal and illegal that people take to help them cope with everyday life. Dealing with disease due to exposure to air pollution, contaminants in our water, or simply living unhealthy lifestyles. There are countless injuries suffered as a result of the sheer volume of cars on the roads, that healthcare providers are expected to cope with.

Behind all this is the pharmaceutical industry that benefits from treating the symptoms rather than society dealing with the problems, so for many business as usual is just fine, and the consequences are somebody else’s problem. 

Work in progress on Is Architecture Enough? The Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture Continues...the follow up to Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture, available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris.

Manhattan Fades to Memory

Manhattan 1998.

Barnes and Noble is much more than a bookstore; the books themselves on dark varnished wooden bookcases give a sense of something more akin to the library of the Reform Club as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. All around, armchairs occupied by people reading newspapers add to the illusion; books on coffee tables are available for anybody to pick up and thumb through. A counter serving coffee and cakes actually encourages people to be there, take their time, and actually enjoy the experience of reading, exploring and usually buying a book or three. For some, shopping is a necessary evil and reserved for times when items need to be procured. For others, it is a leisure activity, and in New York, Macy's Department store occupies a whole block, bounded by Thirty- Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway and could probably occupy a week for the leisure shopper. For the rest of us, it is worth a visit if only to ride on the original wooden escalators, said to be the world’s first, that climb through the ten and a half levels. 

On Fifth Avenue is McDonald’s, close to where the global food chain originated with one man selling hamburgers from a temporary stand at the side of the street. Now situated in a restaurant, the hamburger tastes like it contains beef, the fries actually contain potato, and the regular meal is too much to finish in one hit. This is top food in contrast to the McDonald’s that are available all over the UK. Across the controlled crossing of the Fifth where walk/don’t walk is displayed in the yellow box facing the pedestrians, jaywalking is illegal, so you actually have to wait for the walk sign to be displayed, but there again I would not fancy taking my chances with ten lanes of traffic.

The lobby of the Empire State Building, decked out in marble with a huge mural formed of metal strip set into the marble, forms a stylised elevation of the building with rays of light emanating from the tip of the spire. A ride up in the wood-panelled elevator car takes a few minutes, and the sense of anticipation builds at arriving into the gift shop before taking the walk out into the cage that surrounds the observation deck, which happily is open as it is far too hot for ice now. The panorama is reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where the city of Irene, when viewed from the plateau in the distance, is a different city from the one you would stand within. From here, the places with reputations for being “rough”—Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn—are looking pretty, fed by the constantly moving lines of flux, ignited in the darkness by the car headlights and taillights, painting white-and-red streaks through the cityscape whilst planes streak their own lines across the sky like fireflies as they are flying in and out of JFK and Newark airports; that’s a serious amount of people arriving and departing the metropolis. The chimneys of the power stations along the shore of Brooklyn cast reflections on the ever-moving surface of East River. The glittering spire of Chrysler still glitters at night, its curves picked out in electric light. Flatiron, which looks so tall on the ground, now actually appears as a small triangular block. Following the lines of flux from the traffic that animate Broadway as it heads north, the intensity increases as the flux is augmented by the neon of the theatres and advertisements of Times Square. 

The walking city has made its way to Chinatown—well, almost— at the Storefront, an architectural gallery, which in itself is a dramatic intervention into the cityscape, with doors and windows that are rotating panels set so that they offer fragmented views of the city, where the traffic crosses in front of the brick façades, steel fire escapes adorned with vertical neon signs of the Chinese alphabet. Inside, the walls are covered with a complete fragment of the Archigram exhibition as viewed in Manchester. Here, the exhibition is made up of the work of Ron Herron, best known for “Walking Cities” where more drawings than were seen at Manchester are displayed behind a layer of Perspex (Plexiglas), just giving a hint to the thoroughness of the work undertaken at the time. Here the exhibition also concentrates on the work of Heron’s practice since Archigram, the Imagination Headquarters being the best known. The work of the other members of the group is exhibited at the architecture schools at Columbia University and Cooper Union. 

Like all good things that must come to an end, so does the amazing experience, travelling beneath the Hudson River and into New Jersey. Viewing Manhattan in the rain out of the coach window, somehow quite fitting that the city that has been home for the past nine days, a city of so much life and energy, with every view dominated by the towers, now the silhouettes of Empire State and the Twin Towers fade in the mist as they fade into memory. 

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

- See more at: https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/34546#sthash.MoetB0Co.dpuf

Strawberry Fields to the Oasis...

April 1998. Central Park is a strange place. If you don’t have wheels on your feet, you are a second-class citizen; rollerbladers have priority here, along with the cyclists. You take your life in your hands as you cross in front of them, gaining some worried looks from the fast-approaching rollerblader in the process. The marathon man perimeter fence around the reservoir must be to stop joggers from getting their feet wet if they forget to follow the one-way system. The sloping glass wall of a huge conservatory nestled in amongst the trees presents an entirely different front to the Met, with an obelisk out front (Cleopatra’s Needle?). A bit of research reveals that this is one of three obelisks sold by the Viceroy of Egypt in the nineteenth century, so this is probably the oldest structure from the “civilised” world to exist in North America. 

Strawberry Fields is extremely busy. “Imagine,” the John Lennon memorial, apparently has had fresh flowers placed on it every day since the singer’s death. By contrast, the scene of the crime outside the Dakota Building stands anonymously among the apartment blocks; that is, except for a guy on rollerblades that takes a tumble at that very point, quickly helped up and who apologises profusely for the interruption, before skating off down the street. Back in the park, ice-skaters are getting their feet wet as the 105 degrees air temperature is proving too much to keep the ice rink from melting.

Walking south, traffic, traffic, traffic and the Friday night stampede to get off Manhattan. The stampede is not actually going anywhere due to the sheer volume of traffic. I am told this happens every Friday as workers who stay on Manhattan during the week look to get home for the weekend. The destination for the walk is a jazz club in lower East Village, songs about heads turning up in garbage cans, tales about life in New York, performed by a band with female singer/guitarists, and a really entertaining evening. 

The Lincoln Centre, home of the New York Symphony Orchestra, is strangely deserted during the day. Nearby, a slightly overweight statue of liberty appears above the rooftops of buildings on the opposite side of Broadway. Heading south along Broadway to Columbus circus at the east entrance of Central Park forms one impressive entrance to the subway, not taking the subway now though it is only a short walk to West Fifty- Third Street and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “Humanising Modernism”, an exhibition of the works of Alvar Aalto, displayed in models and immaculate pencil drawings. In the main exhibition are the surrealist works of Salvador Dali, paintings much smaller than anticipated, probably due to the large number of oversized reproductions available as posters. The large canvases of Piet Mondrian, grids, primary colours, seemingly so appropriate to the location; the abstract expressionism of Joan Miro that captures so much life and movement; to the absolute raw energy of Jackson Pollock demand serious attention it could easily take a week to view each piece. Outside, in the sculpture garden, it really feels that MoMA forms an oasis in the desert of skyscrapers. 

Barnes and Noble is much more than a bookstore; the books themselves on dark varnished wooden bookcases give a sense of something more akin to the library of the Reform Club as described by Jules Verne in Around the World in 80 Days. All around, armchairs occupied by people reading newspapers add to the illusion; books on coffee tables are available for anybody to pick up and thumb through. A counter serving coffee and cakes actually encourages people to be there, take their time, and actually enjoy the experience of reading, exploring and usually buying a book or three. For some, shopping is a necessary evil and reserved for times when items need to be procured. For others, it is a leisure activity, and in New York, Macys Department store occupies a whole block, bounded by Thirty- Fourth and Thirty-Fifth Streets, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway and could probably occupy a week for the leisure shopper. For the rest of us, it is worth a visit if only to ride on the original wooden escalators, said to be the world’s first, that climb through the ten and a half levels. 

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

Gotham and the Guggenheim

New York, April 1998.

Arriving back into the World Trade Plaza at eighty-nine degrees (Fahrenheit, not tilt) and heading south to walking between the wedding cakes of Wall Street, the spaces narrow and dark, is this really the financial centre of the world? A brief look in the lobby of the Woolworth building, the Cathedral of Commerce (or is it Monty Python’s “Crimson Life Assurance”?), with stone vaulted ceilings in the lobby, resembles the nave of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Battery Park, large lawns, dense tree planting make a welcome contrast from the landscape of extruded blocks, Victorian streetlights, promenade and seafront pavilions evoke memories of the English seaside. Looking above the trees, the decorated crowns of the towers borrowed from medieval Europe give a clear sense of the inspiration for Gotham City as created by Bob Kane for in the Batman Comics. 

A rather rapid walk back uptown and joining the constant flow of migrating locals heading along the non-diagonal part of Broadway in what amounts to a daily stampede. Opposite, City Hall Park, one of those not square squares, a great place for demonstrations in front of the city hall, immigrant workers at this time and not a “Ghostbuster” in sight. Dragged northwards by the rush moving along to the Soho Guggenheim Museum, not to be confused with Frank Lloyd Wright’s version, the Soho Guggenheim Museum is hosting an exhibition of Chinese art. The compactness of Soho spreads out to give way to parking lots; adverts are painted directly onto the walls of buildings to cover the entire wall. Such streetscape! Broadway starts on the diagonal and crosses a green park at Union Square and emerges unexpectedly alongside the Flatiron building, that when approached from the South is unrecognisable. 

Crossing the corner of Madison Square Park and onto Fifth Avenue, the names Gap, DKNY, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Levis, Banana Republic, seen as concessions in Rackham’s, Birmingham’s department store, are proudly displayed here each with their own large store. Yes, and there is Tiffany’s, seems to be a jewellery store, and I cannot see anywhere to go for breakfast though. Looking up Fifth, above the sea of heads, there are blocks as far as at the eye can see, the zone above the storefronts dominated by US flags that seem to hang from an inclined flagpole on every building.

A fire truck with sirens whooping and zapping, along with the low rumble of air horns, tries to push through the traffic where car drivers seem to have ignored the fact that they are in the fire lane (zap! zap!), keeping to the left side of Fifth, where the shadows cast by the blocks offer some relief from the heat. Up ahead, the Empire State Building emerges above the blocks and the traffic light that is holding everybody up and the perpetual surge of traffic crossing in what seems to be a yellow stream of the ubiquitous taxis.

There is a clearing in the tall blocks, the entrance plaza to the New York Public Library, steps leading up to a white stone plane of arches, columns, pediments, guarded by two lions set against the backdrop of the skyscrapers. Limousines pull up onto the driveway to the Plaza Hotel amongst crowds of onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of somebody important. The hotel façade, representative of a kind of oversized European classical fairytale castle, looks out over the trees and lake and paths and railings of the natural splendour of Central Park.

Continuing the walk up Fifth Avenue, with the park to the left, passing the stone arches, columns, and pediments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or more simply known as the Met as it emerges out of a clearing in the trees. The “real” Guggenheim museum, the one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that appears in the architecture books, reveals itself, the white concrete sculpture, dramatic from a distance, remarkably reminiscent of Lubetkin’s animal enclosures at Dudley Zoo, and on the surface not in much better condition. The concrete has fared better internally and the spiral ramp is impressive, more Chinese art, but the building itself just maybe not living up to its legend. A group of break-dancers arrive and start their routine on the sidewalk, ghetto-blaster, spinning on heads, that kind of thing, to be moved on by the police after a few minutes.

The full story is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble published by Xlibris — Do We Need ARCHITECTS? A Journey Beneath the Surface of Architecture

- See more at: https://scriggler.com/DetailPost/Story/33339#sthash.SSfzUGE2.dpuf