International File 1

“Is this any use?” asked Friend.

She handed me a small, paper backed book bearing an Open University tag and the publisher’s insignia, The Norton Library.

“Where did you get this? I gagged, as soon as I had regained control of my epileptically convulsing body.

“Our local college library is moving out old stock. If you don’t want it, I can always give it to a charity…”

“No!!!”

Friend narrowly escaped a clunk on the head while I clutched the volume to my quivering bosom. Quivering, that is, with concern for the poor charity shop browser who had just been deprived of the opportunity to read one of the earlier editions of The International Style by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson.

Philip Cortelyou Johnson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906. At Harvard University he worked under Walter Gropius, German emigrant and advocate of the new International Style in building. In 1932 he and architectural historian, Henry Russell Hitchcock published the first version of International Style: Architecture since 1922.

The publication of this book was remarkable. Many books had been written on architecture in the course of time but all of them had been tomes on classicism and the gothic and other older styles, in short, hearkening to the past. This was the first time an historian had filled even a moderately-sized volume with essays and pictures on a style of building that had burgeoned in the preceding decade. And the book is still in print.

How does one describe the International Style? It is an essentially clean, stripped-down form of building, free from superficial ornamentation, with due attention paid to proportion and volume, typified by the work of Le Corbusier, Mies van de Roe and, of course, Walter Gropius. What is so darned special about volume in a building? isn't that what they're made for?

For answers, watch this space.

Curious fashions

I’ve just seen a telly-clip about a natty little company start-up, making trendy cycling gear for wimmin.

“Wimmin are image-conscious, said their spokesperson. They (the wimmin) do not want to look like men by wearing fluorescent jackets and helmets on the roads. Our fashions steer wimmin in the right direction.

Then, we were treated to a montage of all those trendy bits of gear; helmets, jackets, leggings, their predominant colour being pink. How curiously human, I thought. What proportion of the population do these mysterious wimmin make up, all universally slim and cute enough to do justice to that gear? And how come they are not afflicted by aching joints and other ailments, and are apparently unaffected by extremes of weather? Not only that, they are able to tackle ground rises and steep hills on their bikes and, most significant of all, they are fearless in the teeth of juggernauts and racing motor cars on overcrowded roads.

How I wish I could live in the land of wimmin, I thought, as the telly-clip drew to a close. If any one of you knows how to get there, please let me know.

Chocablog.

It’s that time of year again. You can’t have failed to notice that the entire world seems to be fashioned of chocolate; bunny rabbits, eggs, chickens and other symbols of springtime fertility are everywhere. If, like me, you are possessed of a sweet tooth, then temptation lies literally in every street corner shop. It is difficult to turn off the tap of a constantly watering mouth at the most quiescent of times, but the choice of programmes on television is making it even more difficult.

Channel 4 is currently screening Willie’s Chocolate Revolution, featuring Willie Harcourt-Cooze, an entrepreneur who has successfully launched his own brand of chocolate. If the confectionery has been successful, then Channel 4 executives have a recipe that must have them licking themselves in delight. In addition to the obvious play on names, ie, Willie Wonka, Harcourt-Cooze is faintly reminiscent of Gordon Ramsay and, together with the same missionary zeal as Jamie Oliver, sets out to prove that cacao – the raw ingredient of chocolate - is actually good for you.

To do this, Willie went in cahoots with a white-coated laboratory researcher. Armed with positive – from his point of view – test results, he came away smiling and ready to convert a posse of Cadbury addicts, with a brace of his own products. Willie H-C claims that their favourite sweet is not really chocolate. This is where I part company with WH-C because a chocolate snob I never will be.

I commit the heresy of believing that chocolate is meant to be munched, crunched, melted, slurped and manipulated into whatever disgusting form that the choc-eater actually enjoys. Any toss-pot concerned about the cacao content of his nutty bar is not only missing the point, he deserves to be coated in cocoa solids and flushed down his own loo. With that, I wish you the happiest of Easters, devouring any brand of chocolate that you so please.

Beavers: I'll be dammed!

You don’t often hear it for the modest, hard-working little beaver. That’s because they are , well, modest and hardworking. Lacking the glamour of, say, the cat family, they shun publicity and devote their time to building dams and houses – Zaha Hadid move over! The talent of the beaver is truly jaw dropping – you might add tree lopping to that. Using nothing but their teeth, they gnaw the trunk of a tree until that critical moment that every lumberjack knows; the trunk breaks and crashes down onto the ground. Then, beaver sets to work on newly-fallen tree, gnawing it into logs and chewing off the branches.

Using his skill as an underwater swimmer and navigator, beaver drags his material and inserts it into just the right area of his own dam to prevent the breaches and floods that might follow. Beaver lives in his lodge, again built by himself, address ‘Penthouse upon Dam’, together with Mrs Beaver and the little beavers. Some years ago, doyens of a television creature-feature placed a movie camera inside a beaver lodge. But a clever inmate came along, peered into the lens and, knowing an intrusion had happened, covered the alien eye with a branch – no Big Beaver House on television that year.

Truly, you cannot say too much in favour of this awesome little creature. What I want to know is, at what stage of evolution did they, their brains hard wired for tree lopping, building design, repair and maintenance, underwater swimming, detecting movie cameras, decide not to evolve any further? It’s my guess they stopped this evolution thing when some bright beaver realised the danger of giving rise to a race of Boris Johnson humanoid look-alikes.

We ought to be grateful for such a decision, else they would have built us all off the planet. Let’s give these enterprising little architects their rightful recognition, now.

Yum-yum linoleum

Somewhere, sometime in the 1960s, I wandered into a general store to buy a loaf of bread, or some such mundane item. Their floor stopped me in my tracks. It was black, with a pattern of lozenges, circles, squares and triangles in colours like lime green, strawberry pink, orange, mint blue…I stood staring at the linoleum, mouth watering for the printed-on candies, until a nudge from some grown-up person sent me back to the great outdoors.

The idea of pure, random shape as art has been with us since Kasimir Malevich painted a black square on a white background. He belonged to the Supremacists, artists who sought to dissociate their paintings from the ‘real’ world. No doubt they found freedom in their floating shapes, after the material excesses and bombastic promise of ‘moral improvement’ of Victorian times.

We carry the meditative legacy of Malevich, Popova and Rodchenko today. We have this triumvirate to thank for polka dots, and candy stripes, gingham checks and those wonderful, jazzy triangles of the 1960s. Brightly-coloured, irreducible shapes in combo are visual music, redolent of fun, youth, innocence, summer days on the beach and impromptu parties on winter nights – just think candy canes, drinking straws, spotted beakers and metal-foil party hats. It is no surprise that the moniker of Tate Modern was a series of regularly spaced dots in Smartie-bright colours.

Which brings me round again to my opening theme – forget your subtle, mock-terracotta and ceramic floor coverings. I like a kitchen lino that looks good enough to eat.

What's new, pussycat?

I have upon my main dining table an array of coasters, you know, those tough little mats that stop cups and glasses from coming in contact with beautiful surfaces. However, I often come in for comments from guests because I leave my entire complement of the things on the table, all the time. My reply is that they all feature, in one form or another, the shape of that designed dream of an animal, the cat.

I don’t see why my collection of cat-mats should be locked away, deprived of air and light, and depriving me of the daily joy of contemplating the little darlings. There they are, receptive to any drink you may care to plonk upon them. This has set me thinking; why are we so unimaginative in our attitude towards coasters? The first set I ever saw was when I was a little ‘un and visiting a neighbour’s house. I was astonished by this picture of horses, hounds and huntsmen in red coats gracing their table, several times over.

Down through the years, I’ve seen them all; country houses, wild flowers, US presidents – I’ve learned, at least, that all the coasters in a set do not have to look the same. There is so much more we could do with coasters. Why not have LCD ones where punters can watch cartoon animations or even feature-length movies? Or even mats that play a musical jingle every time someone puts a drink on top? The possibilities are endless. In these stricken times, the Crazy Coaster Company may provide the basis for some designer’s business empire.

Nobody's going to the moon

This week, a report in the main evening news stated that soon, there will be batteries on the market that will enable ordinary household appliances, laptops and mobile phones, to re-charge in a matter of minutes, rather than hours. This will cut fuel bills and help usher in that long-promised but never quite delivered age of electric-powered motorcars.

Even if I had spent the past three decades awaiting that mode of transport with baited breath – I have not – I’m not exactly gagging for fast-charge batteries. Many years ago, during the 1970s and 1980s, I used to eagerly await a weekly television programme, Tomorrow’s World, where a team of friendly presenters would assure us it was all going to happen; jet-packs to propel us everywhere, thereby eschewing the need for either private cars or public transport. We were going to take our holidays on the moon and employ an army of robots to tackle our nasty, yucky housework. Sound wave emissions were going to knock the crud from our so-sweaty skins and vitamin pills and drinks were going to replace food, thereby rendering the art of cooking obsolete. Well…..

Sometimes, you can only laugh. There is no need to point out the shed-loads of celebrity and wannabe chefs that grace our telly screens, the desperate overcrowding on rail carriage and on road, the growing demand for that ever-scarcer commodity, water. Robots are encroaching more and more closely onto areas where once, only the human brain dared to go and all the while, we struggle with the messy necessity of housework. World hunger is still with us, as is infectious disease, the bed bug and holidaying in Lanzarote….I can’t go on! The list is too depressing. How did we get it so wrong?

Our humanity is saved only by the mass communication system that allows us to exchange ideas on all of this, i.e., grumble.