The Brickmaker's Arms

I am not one for Christmas television but I have to make mention of BBC's Victorian Farm. I could have done without their cracker-making and bon-bon pressing, and as for their marbled wrapping paper, if a body wants to cover their gifts in layers of Jackson Pollock-had-a-nightmare type stuff, then I can think of easier ways to bag it then by filling a vat with expensive, coloured dyes. Nor can I see me stitching flannel underwear or making pots of frightful goo to rub on chilblains. Outside was better. I adored Clumper the horse, loved their exploration of early farm technology, and the scenes of their choosing a ram to impregnate breeding ewes had me rolling in hysterics. The most intriguing item, however, was their demonstration of Victorian brick-making.
Farmers generally didn't make bricks but the team wanted to restore a derelict forge with authentic brickwork, so they called in experts in historical brick-making. Their techniques were a revelation; the preparation of the clay, the moulding of the bricks in wooden frames, their drying out and firing. The last process was the most captivating of all. There is nothing spookier than a kiln filled with items for firing being sealed with spade-loads of clay, then being lit and fed with fuel for days to keep the furnace at the required temperature.
There was another method, more fuel-efficient than kiln firing but taking longer to complete. It involved building rectangular pyres of thousands of bricks, covering the outside layers with clay and then firing with furnaces lit beneath the stacks. According to their firing expert, entire suburbs were built this way, millions of bricks at a time fired on pyres a quarter of a mile long. The one big advantage of this method was that the bricks could be fired, then used on site, rather than relying on the mass-transportation needed for industrially-fired bricks.
It makes my hair stand on end, the thought of suburban skies alight at night with the glow of millions of baking bricks.
The VF team had, of course, great fun during it all, throwing about bits of building history along with potatoes they baked in the ashes of their pyres. It was all very comfortable, filled with camaraderie and self-congratulations - and totally belie-ing the conditions that brickmakers actually lived in. Readers of Bleak House (Charles Dickens) will recall the squalor and misery of the brick-making family, a strand in the complex plot of the story. This family was lost to that Victorian scourge, alcohol, but in reality all brick-makers lived short lives, succumbing to lung disease from ingesting dust, fumes and other byproducts of their trade. Or they simply dropped dead from years of punishing, unrelenting labour, the average of death being forty. They say civilization was built on sacrifice, a sobering thought on looking about the average, Victorian-built suburb.

Oh dear, no deer...

It is almost a year to the day that I reported on an extraordinary happenstance in the south of England. A group of angry people claimed that they were duped into handing over money to gain entrance to a “Lapland” theme park in Hampshire’s New Forest. When the punters arrived, they found themselves in a muddy field surrounded by wooden builders’ hustings, instead of the expected vista of Arctic snow. The only visible “reindeer” were ponies with antlers attached. According to one punter, the promised Christmas bazaar resembled a car-boot sale. At a level, these people had a grievance. All had young children and many had travelled a long way to the rather remote Lapland, believing it be an off-shoot of two other, more successful Laplands. To make a long story short, the angry punters were reputed to have “rioted” in frustration and Lapland was shut down only two days after it opened.

On reading all this I wondered: why do we go to theme parks, at all? Theme parks and themed events bring a dimension of fun and fantasy into our humdrum lives. We go to a theme park in the same spirit that we go on summer and winter vacations. When we return from afar we pour over our photographs and souvenirs, treasuring them as little pieces of the places we have left behind. The desire for pastiche is as profound as the need to keep possession of a lock of hair from the head of a loved one. Without artifice life would be unthinkable. Without our ability to create artefacts we would still be living in trees. Man has pushed this atavistic longing further and further. It brought the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the ancients, gothic cathedrals to medieval citizens and Stourhead to Gloucestershire. In more recent times it has brought us Las Vegas, every Disney park on the planet - and Palm Jumeirah.

Christmas is the ultimate pastiche. We all create it in our own way, every year; in our dwellings, shopping malls, streets, hospitals, schools and factories. Just take one plastic tree strung with baubles, a supply of wine and mince pies, add a few people and – hey presto! Wherever it’s at, it works. To pay a pile of money to travel many miles to find seasonal pastiche in a place that is a take-off of someplace else seems rather sad to me. Of course, it was novelty punters were seeking, rather than the place. – what will we do when the novelties run out, I wonder.

The Nature Of Modernism

Early last week it was reported that the roof of the London 2012 Aquatic Centre has been lowered into place at the Olympic site in Stratford. Designed by leading architect, Zaha Hadid, it is described as an iconic, wave-shaped structure. Indeed, one newsreader compared it to the sting-ray, a large, tropical fish.

The Aquatic Centre has been paralleled with the Birds’ Nest stadium in Beijing in that both structures have been inspired by nature. This has directed my mind towards other parallels between nature and modernism. The nose of an aeroplane reminds me of nothing so much as the head of a swan. Trains – when they’re not on strike – thread their way about the countryside like giant, speeding worms. And certain types of speedboats duck and dive through water like trusty dolphins. Architects like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright took nature to heart.

Corbusier’s Villa Savoye built in 1929 offered the dweller an unparalleled view of the surrounding countryside. In summer, those famous strip windows were filled with the greenery that grew outside while on top of the building was the famous “natural” sun bed. Falling Water, built by Frank Lloyd is fused so completely into its environment, that it is impossible to separate one from the other.

The late JG Ballard famously said that modernism lacked mystery and emotion, but I always disagreed. Modernism won’t sweep you back to a twilit past but fly you to a heady and exciting present. Interestingly, while leafing through my copy of The International Style (Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, 1932), it struck me how dated much modernist architecture and furniture now seems. I’ll bet one day, in a few hundred years or so, some old coot will be waxing nostalgic over shiny surfaces, chrome trim and streamlined bodywork.

No modernism, please. We're British.

A recent newspaper report revealed how the organisers of the Stirling prize for architecture have been accused of harbouring a bias against traditional design, contrary to public preferences. Apparently, a YouGov survey published on October 16 showed that more than three-quarters of the public prefer traditional buildings. Robert Adam, described as a prominent traditional architect, champions the public. In the same newspaper (The Guardian, Saturday October 17) is a report People Say The Building Hugged Them by Aida Edemarian.
It concerns a charity called Maggie’s, named after the late Margaret Keswick Jencks, who died of cancer. Maggie’s is a countrywide chain of advice centres for people that have been diagnosed with the disease. Chain is perhaps the wrong word to use here because it denotes a string of tacky, poorly-designed hutches built as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The late Margaret Jencks was married to Charles Jencks and the Maggie’s buildings have been designed and built by the most prominent architects of the day; Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Piers Gough and others. The Maggie’s building that the feature is concerned with has been designed by the Richard Rogers’ firm, Rogers Sirk Harbour & Partner and is nominated for the Stirling prize.
The name of the article is a giveaway – the building hugged them - explaining the reactions of certain visitors to earlier Maggie’s centres.
My puzzlement with the ‘general public’ disdain of ‘modern’ architecture will continue as long as the general public continue to prefer so-called traditional buildings. This, I suspect, will last my lifetime.

The tyranny of the tie

Earlier this year, for the final weeks of The Apprentice television contest, the pretty features of contender Kate Walsh were underpinned by a tie, not a fashionably feminised one, but one that would not have looked out of place with a male ensemble of suit and shirt. Later on, during the summer’s hot spell, a City employee complained about his firm’s discriminatory policy, namely that men were bound to wear collars and ties at all times, whereas women did not have to.

In 2002, BBC newsreader Peter Sissons came in for censure when he didn’t wear a black tie to announce the death of the Queen Mum. Gordon Brown was accused of ‘bad manners’ in 1997, when as new Chancellor of the Exchequer, he failed to dress appropriately for a black tie affair at the Stock Exchange.

What is it about the neck and shoulder area of the male – equivalent to the leg zone in females – that causes so much contention and is it a coincidence that the hangman’s noose and the serfs’ collar attach themselves to the same area? In the nineteenth century, a middle-class male tied a large floppy bow about a stiff, white collar. By the twentieth century, this had morphed into the necktie that we know today. As well as adding the finishing touch to male dress, ties are often used as badges of identity. Attendees of exclusive schools hang onto their uniform ties and air them at formal reunions. Engendering this sense of belonging and subsequent networking, along with the wearing of ties, are seen as male traits. So, what was Kate Walsh trying to tell us?

In the early twentieth century, various ‘liberation’ movements gave rise to the new woman, a creature that had the right to work alongside a man, to go to school and be seen as his equal. To denote her male status, the new woman put on a tie. A century later, female school uniforms still incorporate ties – I actually wore one. By wearing a tie, the new woman was endowed with a capacity to think intellectually, and when at work to subsume her thoughts and ideas from individual pursuits into those of her corporation.

One century later, women have won the right to put their necks into the same noose that has ever been provided for men. And this brings me back to Kate Walsh. She didn’t win this year’s Apprentice. That honour went to non-tie wearing Yasmina Siadatthan. Kate is now pursuing a television career.

Leg zone or battle zone?

It is a commonly accepted thing that female fashion is always changing, and that women are obliged to go with the trend, or else be deemed second-class citizenry. I don’t know if this has anything to do with an extraordinary event involving me, a decade and a half, ago.

I had been made redundant and was dutifully doing the round of employment agencies. To mark the occasion and to counter the frightful weather at the time, I kitted me out in navy wool jacket and brand-new, ultra-conservative black Alexon trousers, teamed with flat, black shoes. I looked every inch – I thought – the creative professional hunting for the perfect position. One spring afternoon, during yet another agency interview, a chippy female recruitment consultant told me that I might increase my chances of employment if I was to wear a skirt.

When I had recovered my surprise, I pointed out the necessity of dressing for the weather, for serial pavement pounding, and the importance of not eroding one’s redundancy pile purchasing fripperies such as nylon tights. She waved my arguments away, insisting that the non-show of leg, from knee to ankle, greatly lessened a girl’s chances of worthwhile employment. When she had finished speaking, my interviewer stood up and moved from behind her desk to reveal her feet in slippers; not the elegant, heeled kind but the good, old carpet variety with fur about the rims – what was this? Comfort for her, and pain and suffering for me.

I stared pointedly at them, trying to cause her as much discomfort as possible, in return for the put-down she had thrown at me. I still gag at the surreality of the situation and of her argument, especially when I now see a tidal wave of women going to work in comfortable, sensible garments. I have lost touch with corporate employment and sincerely hope those days are over forever – but I’m not sexist. My next feature will be on the subject of that male manacle, the collar and tie. I promise.

Vital Vidal

Seven years ago, I bought a Vidal Sassoon hairdryer for the princely sum of £12.99; 1800 watts, folding handle, 2 heat/speed settings, worldwide dual voltage, cool shot button, 2-year guarantee. Seven years down the line, it is still in perfect running order. In all the time I have had it, it has never given any trouble; coughed, spluttered or conked out while in use. Indeed, its lack of temper and even temperament is in direct opposition to the hank of hair that it routinely grooms.

Compact and streamlined, the brand name emblazoned in plain, white lettering on its shiny black casing, using it is rather like being in the company of one of those maddeningly well-spoken, ex-public school kids who never err, whether by word, deed, or gesture. How you long to see these scions of the well-to-do betray emotion, sprout dishevelled hair and effect slurred speech, just for once.

I am certain that these people have vices. Indeed, I know it. Yet somehow, they keep their private personae just that, private. Maybe that is the essence of good breeding? Meanwhile I have my hairdryer for company – and example.

Brickbusting,,,

It is thirty-seven years since Tate Gallery acquired artist Carl André’s Equivalent VIII. This installation comprises one hundred and twenty fire bricks arranged in two layers in a six-by-ten rectangle. When first exhibited at Tate Gallery in 1976, now Tate Britain, the piece drew much criticism from the press because of the perception that taxpayers’ money had been spent on paying an inflated price for a collection of bricks. (Wikipedia)

Ah, what a genius is André, what a visionary! His installation went on display in a quiet interval in British history, that pause before the buying and selling of brick and mortar became the passion, the all-time obsession of the paying public. Interestingly, the media reaction to Equivalent VIII was also symptomatic of things to come. It is only taxpayers’ money that must never be spent on building and its raw materials, their own built patches never drawing quite enough cash from private buyers.

But who is Carl André? He was born in Massachusetts in 1935 and studied art at Phillips Academy, Andover. Later, he was to work with Constantin Brancusi and Frank Stella. From 1960 to 1964 André worked as freight brakeman and conductor in New Jersey, an experience that was to influence both his art and personality. For a number of years he concentrated on writing, most notably his concrete poetry, in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the elements of the poem; meaning of words, rhyme, rhythm, and so on.

In 1965 he had his first exhibition of minimalist sculpting; a term applied to various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. (Wikipedia) If any artist alive knows about fundamental features, it is certainly Carl André.

Nappy days!

No, I haven’t become a parent, but I’ve just spent some time in the company of one and I feel it my duty to warn other parents of dark, low-down dangers lurking out there. It all happened while Mum, Baby, older Junior and I were touring the local shopping paradise. Mum bought a stash of much-needed nappies from a branch of a well-known pharmacy chain.

Set up for the day, we continued on our tour, pouring over all manner of goods; toys for older Junior, clothing, shoes, cosmetics and jewellery. In short, it was a girls’ day-out heaven. However, when we entered an upmarket department store, the security system alarm rung. Our party was definitely the transgressor. Later, when leaving the store, we artfully divided our shopping between Mum, older Junior and me, and all went through separate gates.

It was my first time ever to set bells ringing. A female security office appeared out of nowhere, offering her assistance. My carrier bag contained a pair of (paid for) sandals – and the plastic sack of nappies. The security check turned into a good-natured banter. What if, I said, there was a security tag attached to all the nappies, and Baby set off alarms wherever she went?

A laughing security woman left us. We hurriedly returned to the pharmacy where they deactivated (how that?) an electronic tag on the nappy bag. Of course, Baby gurgled nonchalantly throughout the entire incident, which has left me wondering: does the phrase secure nappy have a new meaning?

Cool and modern...

Once upon a time I lived in a big, old house in south London. Though I loved the place, there were certain minor inconveniences. The huge, sash windows made the building difficult to heat in winter. At night, if you were lying in bed while someone else ascended or descended the staircase, you were rocked about in bed, gently or otherwise. This was not always an unpleasant experience, but it was a constant reminder that every house begins slowly descending back to nature from the day that it is built.
However, this old house had one great advantage. On the hottest of hot summer days – and there were plenty – the stairwell that ran through the building acted like a cooling tower. It was oriented so that little sun shone there after ten in the morning, its one window facing east. It was also blessed with a mosaic ground floor. On really hot afternoons, it was a joy to recline against the newel post in a cane chair, making believe you were hanging out in the Alhambra.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls….

One disadvantage of modernism in summertime is its copious use of glass. Le Corbusier built the Villa Savoye with a sunroof to compensate for this. But if you don’t wish to follow the sunbathing craze, newly fledged in the 1930s and now discredited, what do you do? Now that summers are getting hotter, I envisage a new type of modernism. Keep the pale walls – great for bouncing back the rays of the sun – and the flat roofs, and the (specially-coated) windows and glass walls. But instead of expensive and environmentally unfriendly air conditioning, adopt – and adapt – the Arabic principle of the cooling tower.

This could possibly be a ‘revet’ added to the north face of every domestic dwelling. In the case of apartments, the revets could be spaced between apartment in the block. In either case, vents connected to the revet could be opened or closed, and would open onto each room in the dwelling. And the revets need not be ugly. It is not long since chimney places formed the ‘hub’ of domestic houses, well, the revet could be the new hub. Well-designed and harmoniously paced, these new, hubbed houses would become as much a part of the modernist landscape as wind turbines and solar panels. So, that be the principle. Architects and engineers, over to you.

Glassism, cubism and futurism

Several post ago, I alluded to the recent innovation of an interior wall of glass blocks that transformed the house I grew up in from a quasi country cottage to one with, er, an interior wall of glass blocks. What is the connection between glass and modernism? Modernist buildings tend to use copious amounts of glass; glass that was first manufactured en mass in the foundries of the nineteenth century. Glass may appear to be a static substance but it is not. Glass is made primarily of silica, a substance drawn from sand and gravel. When molten it can be moulded into a variety of shapes – think of glass ornaments.

It can be rolled into flat sheets, or rounded forms, or cut into blocks. Glass can be plain, coloured, frosted, muted, gilded or polarised, rendering it impervious to UV rays. During the day a mirrored glass building reflects the surrounding world; the tide of moving traffic and pedestrians at ground level. Further up it reflects the ever-changing vista of sky and cloud. At night, light inside a building renders its inhabitants visible to the outside world. How about a movement in art called glassism?

Cubism in art was a blossoming of futurism, a movement sparked off in 1909 by Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto. In painting, futurism and cubism are concerned with the representation of dynamism and movement. When you try to perceive the world through a wall of glass blocks, you see it reproduced as many times as there are blocks and reduced in size. Not the real world, you may say, but what is the real world? No doubt painters like Picasso and Carra pondered on this as they created their images of worlds splintered and distorted in many ways.

A day at the races...

I arrived mid-morning at Waterloo. At first I thought that the guy in the top hat and tailed coat had simply gotten lost on the way to the Palace. But soon I noticed other subjects in morning suits, and chiffon dresses, and froufrou hats - and the women were dressed up, too!

Natch, it’s Ascot, I thought, as cameras clicked copiously on the concourse. It was all great fun, free of pretence at style or fashion and really, rather naff. But what better way to go in these recession-bound times, than to take time out from pretending to make money, get the glad rags on and spend a day at the races.

This brief exercise in concourse couture set me thinking: why do brightly-coloured frocks look so stunning alongside black suits? More next time…

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!

Putrid Pastels

Now that summer is upon us, the pastel brigade is out in force. You know what I mean; middle-aged matrons - and their men – busting out of dresses and shirts fashioned from icky-ticky, eety-tweety pale pinks and lilacs and blues – uck! It’s enough to make you feel that way, too. Give me the deep, the bright, the vibrant, forever.

It is not so much the colours I object to as the collective age of their wearers. The reason you dress babies in pastels is because you don’t want to blind the little ‘uns before they can walk or talk. While there is nothing so cute as a baby’s nursery fashed out in pale pink or blue, and the teeny occupant dressed that way, too, there is something creepy about someone who expresses their age in decades all done up like a dripping ice-cream. They seem to be saying

Look at me! I’m young, too. And clean and pure with it.

Paradoxically, there is nothing ‘pure’ about pastels. Pinks and lilacs and lemons are actually ‘corruptions’ of primary colours, then faded almost into non-existence. This strikes me as being a metaphor for life – corruption followed by a steady progression towards the grave. Could this be why so many oldies veer towards pastels? Think about it, the next time you don that taupe and pale-blue shirt.

Aloha!

Years ago, I came into possession of a Hawaiian shirt, by virtue of a close relative that went on holiday to Honolulu. It was a glorious creation, bright red and patterened all over with those dinky little black and yellow fishes – I think they call them monk fish – swimming among reeds of the same colour.

It became my favourite summer shirt, comfortable and practical to wear – stains don’t show up easily – and it stopped traffic whenever I wore it. Over the years, however, the bright colours faded into insignificance and by the time I retired it into the recycling bag, it was but a ghost of its former self. It was only then that I became aware of the negative currents surrounding Hawaiian shirts, generally – be they covered in hibiscus flowers, palm trees, blazing suns or humming birds.

Thank goodness you don’t wear that shirt with the fishes, any more friends were wont to say. My astonishment increased when I uncovered an entire world of scorn directed at the shirts by fashion columnists and style gurus. Strange when this few square feet of Polynesian polyester is not exactly prevalent - outside of Waikiki beach, that is. These same fashionistas routinely endorse the crippling ladies’ shoes they call stilettos, puffball skirts and other frightful fads – what about those trousers that hang down from the nether regions, revealing what they are supposed to conceal and hampering the movement of the wearer?

In short, I will go on championing the Hawaiian shirt. I may even go to Honolulu for another one.

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.

Marshmallows: a wobbly bridge to childhood

One good thing about this horrible weather is that it gives a body the opportunity to rediscover the glory of the humble marshmallow. I cannot praise this sweet little number highly enough. Like a duvet that is gossamer-light and heavenly warm, you would think it had been designed specially to put people at their ease.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is no such thing as a designer marshmallow. It just doesn’t have the connotations of connoisseurship that, say, chocolate has. Show me a marshmallow snob and I’ll present you to the Queen of Sheba. There is no checking for percentages of cocoa solids, or any of that. You just go to your nearest sweet counter, select a bag of these brightly-coloured candies, and bring them home.

Marshmallows thrive in any temperature, with the minimum of packaging. No need for foil wrapping, or cantilevers of corrugated sheets, or gilt-edged insets bearing the legend of every pretentious confection in the box. Marshmallows come in two colours; basic white and baby pink, gloriously uncomplicated and infinitely infantile, creating a wobbly bridge of memory between you and that long-lost time; childhood.

Marshmallows are very much themselves, unlike those awful ‘jelly’ sweets, they never masquerade as space rockets or sports’ cars. Nope, marshmallows all come in that friendly, tactile shape, warm and comfortable to touch without creating that dreadful, brown drizzle that a too-long held piece of chocolate generates. You just bite into a marshmallow and immediately, you are wrapped in that afore-mentioned duvet of sweetness and light. I hope the cold weather lasts a while, yet.

Be cool, go pool.

No matter how hopelessly the old year ended, no matter how dreary the weather or how badly the excesses of Christmas have affected you, there is always a note of expectation and optimism at the beginning of a new year. You know the days can only grow brighter, longer and warmer. You eagerly begin writing in your crisp new diaries and organisers. You relish those shiny Christmas gifts and begin to wear, eat and use them.

It is no wonder so many people make ‘resolutions’ at this time; promising themselves new jobs, homes, lovers and bodies in the months ahead. So, they forge ahead on a regime of CV-writing, dieting and exercising. Being a fan of the swimming pool, I do not find the exercise bit difficult. Swimming is the joy of the modernist, especially since women were released from those ridiculous nineteenth-century bathing costumes. It is no coincidence that the nineteen-thirties saw a flurry of pool and lido-building.

What could be more modernistic than stripping down to the ultimate utilitarian garment and plunging into an environment where you can float, glide, trash, splash and cavort to your heart’s content? Not only is swimming enjoyable, it is actually good for you! I have no figures to quote here but while in action, you can actually feel the water toning your limbs, and hear blood pumping around your anatomy in response to the accelerated beating of your heart.

Swimming soothes aches and pains, calms mental anxieties and when done, enables you to focus your mental energy in a way that, earlier, seemed impossible. Which makes it an even greater shame that many fine pools have closed down in recent years. Indeed, a sizeable portion of the population is frustrated in its attempt to swim because of lack of access to suitable pools. In this health-and-fitness conscious era, this is nothing short of a national scandal. Let’s campaign for more public pools, now.

Uggly Work Afoot

Just recently, I posted a piece on the difficulties inherent in buying ladies’ night attire. I’ve just been through another retail trauma, this time involving the purchase of ladies’ walking shoes – note the word walking. Judging by what was on offer in the normally sane Shoon outlet, you would end up believing that manufacturers live in a fantasy world as regards footwear for women – and think that we do, too.

All I wanted was a pair of shoes that looked good, felt comfortable and that one can actually walk in. There are plenty of shoes out there that look good, that is, if you lead the Jolie/Kidman lifestyle, tripping from chauffeur-driven car to movie set, and then home again. Mock-croc patent and suede ankle fringes over impossibly spindly heels are useless on rough, urban terrain, bedevilled by the elements.

And there were plenty that were no doubt comfortable, looking for all the world like cut-down Uggs. But what if you don’t want to negotiate the world in fleece-lined, slipper-like booties that flap around your ankles like toothless gums? After a while searching, I thankfully grasped a streamlined, leather walking shoe, only to be told: Those, Madam, are for men.

Aaasaagh! It was all I could do not to knock over the display. I finally found my quarry, a pair of quasi-boots that fitted my original criteria – and me. Great, but why do women have so little choice in footwear alongside the vast array available to men? Short of making our own, what can we do?

The Mystery of the Flying Ducks

Like the Black Death, we know not where it came from, or to where it has gone. But we do know that it afflicted at least half the population of the western world during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. There was but one, definite symptom; the presence of a set of three, duck-shaped pieces of plaster or china - small, middle-sized and large - arranged in ascending order of size upon a living-room or entrance hall wall of the afflicted household.

Every household that I had access to had at least one set. Ours had two; a brightly-painted plaster, vaguely art deco-ish set in the hall, and a finer, more subtly crafted china set in the sitting room. Indeed, there were so many variations on the flying duck theme, you could judge the social standing and character of a household by the nuances of the set it had chosen.

What intrigued me, however, is why homeowners felt the need to bring this simulacrum of the wilderness into their dwellings? What atavistic longing did these pieces of glue and dust vicariously satisfy? At one level, it's quite apparent. We all long to stretch our wings, clipped by rents and mortgages, and fly into a metaphorical wilderness where we can fulfill our deepest desires and yearnings.

Transparent enough, but why ducks? Why identify with these commonplace animals, generally accepted as being rather stupid? Why not beautiful swans or mythical dragons? Maybe the craze died down when the population cottoned on to the true nature of the worship of these rather dubious household gods?

I can't remember at exactly what point on the calendar that our two sets of ducks were vanquished. But vanish they did, along with those of a myriad other households. No doubt they went, via cardboard box, into attics and second hand shops everywhere. And I'll bet many are out there still.