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!