21ST CENTURY LIVING; notes on NINE ELMS, an observational analysis
Some self-projections/ The Future (of London)/ Architecture for Control Society
31.10.24
Take a walk to Nine Elms, no headphones, to be with myself / inner voice & the city. Tried to push out of my mind with each step the image of a homeless guy at the station at Hithergreen the night before. He looked a lot like my brother - dark curled hair and brown eyes that weighed upon his nose, slightly crooked, altogether giving a wide-open and sorry expression. He didn’t ask me for anything, just looked at me like he knew me, with a his thumb bandaged and pointed at the station ceiling, fluorescent light rendering him naked/ invisible in the wake of the swell of alighted passengers.
All around, the day is saturated with pain - a man passing with crutches and a medical boot limps & wheezes. Take a break to jot down these notes on a bench in the Pleasure Gardens, and someone comes up to me asking for a pound with anguish.
The clouds are gelatinous - filtering the sunlight in mushrooming bands like the whole world over London is bandaged. But despite this, something in the air still feels fresh & bright in this last portion of the day.
The squirrels amble through their activities, cross the path in-front of me as I walk it, as if I don’t exist.
The Pleasure Gardens are for everyone. People are free to suffer here.
Pick up a metro left on a bench - the crossword & sudoku near filled in. Carry with me the presence of a stranger.
—
The Embankment
Broken straps of sun bounce against the clouds that grow rosier and orangier as the hour stretches, like blood rushing to ones face, flushed, or alabaster marble, rosso, sinuous. (Clouds are the tissue of the sky.) The evening’s becoming stony, like blushing granite.
The Thames is brown, running in all directions, running, longitudinally, to its banks.
Sit on a stone partition containing bushes, the perimeter of a pub/restaurant terrace, and look out across the river view. There are no benches on this part of the Embankment - the pub terraces have a seating monopoly.
The Power Station appears near & far & flat like the reflection in a mirror .* The river runs near & far & flat & deep. The diffused & fading light from the bandaged sky frosts the river like a mirror reflecting nothing/ another mirror/ the periphery of an empty room. People pass, my ass grows colder. Uber boat kicks up a froth. The bank makes itself known, from behind this wall, by the sound of it washing. There’s a momentary lapping, a tide. Time is taken over by it/ time is suspended.
Get up from my cold stoop and lean over the wall, notice that the Thames water is actually clear at its edges. The image of cars piled up and carried by a terracotta wave comes to mind- today’s news of the flood in Valencia.
The Embankment’s apartments begin to blink open their lights, or it is murky enough out here to now notice them. Cross-fit trainers and rowing machines, silhouetted. A water feature dances a shallow reflection on a black granite wall, part of an entrance to a gated community. A kind of slick moat, pumping its own constant tide.
Stand reflected in the folds of a satin curtain - make out the gestures of informal business going on behind.
—
The Zone
Turn away from the river, towards 21ST CENTURY LIVING, and people start to shrink. Shrunken by the Zone. The zone of the model / of order. The Architecture of the model/ order/ control. Where people become accessories to the architecture/ ‘landscape’. Shrunken in the model, they become a context for its reason for being rather than... the reason for its being ? Exemplary and alienated, simultaneously ? The buildings themselves giving the impression of placeless/ ahistorical origins. Design that models humans, Designer Life.
Glass the colour of an overcast dusk, like now. The zone blues, becoming water & towering boxes of light & illuminated triangles of designer grasses. The Night-workers begin a shift, a silent changing of the guards, the cleaners ready their playlists, coffee cup and carpet smells. The Night-workers: the Cleaners, the Guards.
A tiny body up 12 floors or so in a near by building, the other side of the Site, stands still, an insect fixed in a pane of amber. I take a picture with my phone, he moves away. I’m excited by the thought we might be watching each other. He paces back and forth - on the phone ? The chasm of distance/ the negation of advantage/ our point-of-view connected/ he doesn’t notice me at all.
Blue lights - undercover police car, stopped. The light skims easily over/under a cantilevered floor, a floating mass of concrete. Concrete, glass, water, stone; surfaces that carry signals of warning.
‘Fuck The Police’ chants a man zipping by on a scooter.
The Site wall reads; SERENE NEW CITY
—
American Embassy
Sit on a long bench that stretches round the back of the Embassy.
Untouchable, the Embassy’s stately moat ripples light & shadow across its wall, moving like fine seaweed. A ring of grassland & wild flowers & glass boxes containing armed officers further make up the Embassy’s shield. All roads lead to the embassy.
Rushing water & rushing road. Woman paces back and forth on the phone, talking in something like Russian. Would the US embassy employ many Russian cleaners?
The moat, the road, a plane. These sounds seem to travel further / are amplified by the darkness now fallen. Chill and darkness reflecting 21st century reverb. The moat, the road, a plane, the Russian, the ducks (4) float motionless all of a sudden - lulled to sleep by the ambient cacophony. Imagine a spell or glitch that casts a slumber over the entire Zone. This imagining is broken by a tannoy- the embassy speaks with a metallic voice of jagged vowels, something about security, please be advised…
The urge to leave / The urge to stay.
A stream of people. Perhaps that was the announcement for closing time. Dark jackets, work bags, clopping shoes. Yellow/green fluorescence. The difference between an office and a home ?
This long bench, that wraps around this back half of the moat. This long bench, with hardly anyone sat on it. This long bench - it’s not for sitting on.
Two trees, illuminated by a streetlight / stadium light hybrid, present autumn quintessentially. They ornament the path that follows the moat, standing just where the path bends out of sight, and the embassy workers disappear around it, shrinking as they go. This long bench, made in the image of this path, made in the image of this moat.
Follow the path - it leads me out, back to the road, the periphery of the Zone. Must re-enter.
—
The Severed Foot
An icon ? A warning ?
Laterally recumbent on its pedestal, the Foot marks the start of a short, meandering promenade that passes a Philadelphia-style stake-house on the corner. The Foot, enormous by foot standards, is dwarfed by the buildings. The monstrousness of the architecture negates the surreal effect of the art (from a distance). Closer, it’s a cold spectacle of horror (and confusion). And yet, to me, the monumental Real out-horrors.
I’ve been thinking about the function of Public Sculpture as a means to de-hostilitise - to render an environment as ‘friendly’ by way of the surreal / queer (a) … to confuse/ distract from an environment’s inherent mechanisms of control ( in a similar way to user- friendly interfaces). This can also be seen in the re-naturing / landscaping of built environments, where nature acts as boundaries / channels / defences. And further, how nature acts as an illusion of freedom/ escape/ tranquility. A Tranquilliser. Uncanny sculptures become vessels for questioning that turn your focus from the built environment. Renders it as one of potentials in intellectual play and satiates the soul. An example of this was unveiled in Vauxhall a few weeks ago, where the Oval Village development site continues to morph. A ‘White Rhino’ plays a game of chess with an anthropomorphic Dog who wears a suit, next to the big Tesco.
[ However, a genuinely subversive example, in my mind, of public sculpture is Jesse Pollock’s ‘The Granary’, that you can find on Cunard Place in the City. Made of steel sheet and joined by bulging, almost pustulating seams, the colour of radioactive rust, it appears molten, swollen with hot air, heaving, at the point of rupture. Metal returns to an expressive and elemental state, questioning our associations of material, of buildings being stoic and self-contained. Materially, formally, The Granary resists the homogeneity of the offices that it is sandwiched between and sears itself upon their facades in reflections, infiltrating transparent impenetrability. But try to take an i-phone picture of yourself reflected on the leg or underbelly of The Granary and you will near-fail ! By its surface being irregular and unpolished, it refuses to have the self reflected upon it, refuses your appropriation by way of imposing ones image. If you do manage to recognise something of yourself in a murky reflection, you are transformed like that of a fun-house mirror. It’s a portal to someplace else - a site of imagining - a curious destabilising rather than a reinforcement. It’s a glorious black-hole gilded orange/red ! A site of Nostalgia disrupting the site of Progress !
I’ve digressed.]
Back to the Severed Foot; there is no space for ‘wonder’, as seen in Jesse’s Granary, only anonymous death. The death of … freedom ? The death of reality ? The death of movement ? The death of culture ? The death of history ?
Foot dream explanation from https://www.myislamicdream.com/severed_foot.html :
“If one sees one of his feet turning into a stone, it means that he will be deprived of its use. […] If one's foot is amputated in a dream, it means that he will loose half of his wealth. If both his feet are amputated in the dream, it means that he will lose all of his wealth, or that he may die shortly.”
So quickly do these wide pavements collect and empty of people.
—
Seen through the glass entrance to the South Pavilion of the Embassy: a wall of Sean-Scully-esque canvases.
2 boys kick a football about in the arena of the entrance, hitting the glass a couple times. The ball then rolls to me, sitting on a concrete cube that makes up a curve of concrete cubes acting as a perimeter to South Pavilion doors. I kick the ball back, off- kilter.
Spin around, and the media-famous swimming pool is lit up blue, like a floating tank of bleach / the looming outcome of a gameshow yet to be unleashed. Suspended, like Atlas, it parts The Alchemist from Darby’s, the colour of a police siren, the colour of order.
Pedestrian areas morph into ponds, with lily pads and marshes to break your fall. From a different concrete cube, part of another string of concrete cubes this time lining a patch of grass favoured by dogs and owners, I meditate on how one must watch their step. It takes a second but the faint rush & hum of the filter system infiltrates my consciousness.
—
A Ferrari.
A perfect lawn in-front of Penguin Random House, laid so its mow-lines perfectly follow / takeover paving slabs. I watch Penguin’s employees leave the office, hovering at the glass doors as the group is held by their final rituals, then scatter like marbles magnetic to the concrete. On the floors above Penguin, the Cleaners set to work on the tables of other less- iconic businesses.
Walk away along an edge of the perfect lawn, notice this edge is yellowed - clearly, it struggled to take to the soil.
A hostile environment, exploiting the goodwill of plants ? Although, even the plants seem vacuous, dare I say it, complicit - as dependents, as by-standers.
Somebody’s Sheba starts drinking the irrigation water, the arteries of this concrete wetlands. Her owner nearly falls in by disciplining her.
Walk past a vent disguised as an abstract sculpture/ object / feature. A cloud of chlorine gives it away. Perhaps I’m standing on top of a swimming pool. It’s warm and familiar in this spot. I linger.
Architecture of/ for the internet
Architecture of / for control societies.
—
—
*Earlier that day, O translated a bit of an Ungaretti poem that read something like, My darling, who’s face is far away like a mirror. I appropriated the metaphor near-immediately.
—
[This post was a bit existential - I’ve been on a post-travel come down.]