International File 2

Several posts ago, I wrote about the International Style, a building trend that emerged in the early twentieth century. Just to recap, an International Style building was defined by the presence of regular features in favour of symmetrical, transparent walls that give a sense of volume and activity within, and an absence of superficial ornamentation.

One hundred years ago, there emerged a need for architecture that reflected the new, more democratic nature of life. The idea of people entering buildings through grand, elevated entrances, their arcane activities shielded by classical hauteur, was set aside. By 1926, architect Walter Gropius had build the flagship building for the Bauhaus School of Art in Dessau, Germany. It is still standing today.

You will see no elevated entrance stuck in the centre of an ‘imposing’, symmetrical façade. Instead, the school is a group of rectilinear buildings with thin planes of glass and concrete for walls. The administration building has strip windows, while the students’ living quarter has a ‘checkerboard’ arrangement of windows. Meanwhile, the workshops have entirely transparent walls, allowing people outside to see the buzz of activity within.

This ideal, that transparency should be elevated to the metaphorical, ie, everyone aware of what everybody else is doing, has not exactly been our legacy, this in spite of a plethora of modernist buildings. The CCTV camera has replaced the pane of glass to enable the powers-that-be to scrutinise us for the wrong reasons. But recently, we have gotten our revenge and are now watching them, closely. Whether any good will emerge from this anticipated new accountability by bankers and politicians, remains to be seen.

Politics on wheels.

It’s in the news. It’s everywhere. You don’t have to be a sage to know that motorcar sales are down by a third on this time last year. On television, there is montage after montage of thousands upon thousands of gleaming, unsold vehicles in factory forecourts, all over the world. Manufacturers, governments, et al, are doing everything in their power to get the motor industry moving again.

For the manufacturer, it is a simple, bread and butter thing. I don’t know how much it costs to make one vehicle but I can guess the manufactory plant is highly expensive, has been heavily invested in and needs to be continually sweated so that everybody gets his money back – and then some.

The reason for governmental panic is more obscure. Even an aging vehicle needs to be taxed, insured and fed with fuel, thus ensuring a stead flow of revenue to the public coffers. What this government and every other dreads is the spectacle of mass unemployment among semi-skilled – mostly – males, an army of angry, restless and redundant workers, calling out for a change in the system that has failed them. Whichever way you look at it, a car is a highly political thing.

It is not a happy picture, and is one that no-one wants to see, and is most likely the reason for the plethora of mixed messages that the government has been sending out. In a recently vanished time of plenty, they were encouraging us to exercise more, to consume less in both terms of food and fuel. Now, they are guaranteeing significant sums of money everyone propitious enough to buy a new motorcar.

I had thought that the age of the motorcar was over. Just as we have been through the age of the mineral, vegetable, animal and human, the roads will no longer be dominated by hordes of bog-standard vehicles, but instead a mix of bicycles and ‘intelligent’ cars, attuned to specialist and special needs. Redundant plant and surplus labour can redeployed in one of the new ‘green’ industries, e.g., solar panel manufacturing. It is all easy to say, of course, but we have to face the future, and that future might just be now.

Do farmers dream of electronic sheep?

Counting the sheep used to be a time-honoured way to bypass the ravages of insomnia, and move into the land of nod. Now, following a directive from Brussels, it has taken on a new meaning. Apparently, every sheep farmer within the EU (ewe?) has to endow each member of his flock with an electronic tag. Not being a son of the soil, I’m unsure of the details, but it works something like this.

When Farmer takes his flock to market, each little woollikin has his tag read to ensure that he is who Farmer says he is – ID checks for sheep? When the little woollikins are taken home, or taken wherever, the tags are run through the reader again. This, claims Brussels’ man is the only way to authenticate the mutton stocks, to prevent the spread of disease, and so on.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but shepherding is the oldest profession in the world, featuring strongly in Genesis and other historical works. Present-day shepherds and farmers are at the receiving end of a chain of knowledge and wisdom stretching back thousands of years. Apart from the eye-watering £25 - £30,000 that the system is going to cost each farmer, no-one wants his profession dictated by bureaucrats and electronic merchants.

“And what,” asks one farmer, “what will we do if our system breaks down?”

Again, I’m unqualified to answer, but I do think that this example of woolly thinking deserves one, big baaaaaaaaaaaah!