John Chamberlain, architect
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30 November 2006
SWINGING LONDON, AGAIN!
SIR: I don't know whether I am dying or just tired. I remember a story of a doctor friend of mine who was disciplined due to some adverse reaction to a patient who had died in an emergency. The doctor had shouted at the dead man in envy at his giving up the ghost and looking peaceful. My doctor friend had been on duty for more than 60 hours without sleep and was rather tired also, and very annoyed at the ingratitude and ease with which the patient had died.
I suppose my reaaction to the July Architectural Review was something like that. However, tiredness isn't like dying.
The content of July presented me with a series of references which reminded me of the swinging sixties in London, presumably the reference key, although not taken to extremes in your issue.
However it had many hidden memories.
First, the London Biennale, with or without Foster's sheep. Was he ill?
Peter Murray (The Future City exhibition) who I remember as a student from Bristol. I bought 50 copies of Megascope magazine in 1964, after meeting him in Caledonian Place where he had a basement flat. Megascope was the Bristol equivalent to the Archigram magazine and had the quintessential references to technology and futurism much in vogue at the time. It was as an undercurrent to the influence of the traditional 4 by 2 Barry Bucknell do-it-yourself type course we had at Birmingham School of Architecture with Douglas Jones, who moved to Bristol. It's more than forty years ago so he still has the energy which marked the original publication. That must be a record!
The AR celebrated Richard Rogers (Spanish Soft Machine), again from the '60s, and for whom I nearly worked, who has finally won a UK prize. I passed through Paris in the early '70s and went to the Beaubourg site offices looking for a job on my way to Lisbon. As an Archigram buff it was all too much for me and I continued on to Lisbon.
Still, looking at the Madrid Airport teminal building I felt rather old, as if the thing was from this period.
Then Paul Finch refers to the Future City exhibition which I saw in August, and again it reminded me of the utopia fixation of the time. The Metabolists, Arthur Quarmby, Fuller and Friedman, all brought back memories of the optimism of the swinging London scene. Memories of Carnaby Street, Ad-lib and the office I worked in opposite the Beatles headquarters on Saville Row, thanks to Thom Jestico, who went on to work with Farrell & Grimshaw in their new office, which finally exploded. It all came back. Still I got the chance to dine in Terry Farrell's flat in the Bayswater Tower, still there today.
Forty years on the Future City exhibition repeated the undercurrent of the '60s preoccupation with the future, alongside the hedonistic spectacle of today's architectural fashion show and souvenir buildings.
Let's see if the French can put together an exhibition on the lines of the Instant City spread at Harvey Nichols, or the first London lecture at the RIBA with Cook and company with pop music and most people suggesting that the whole Archigram thing was comic book antics of a fringe group. Even Peter Cook got angry and stated that he preferred a car park anyway to trees or something of the kind. It was held on a Saturday anyway. Great Fun ...
The '60s seems a hell of a long way back.
Anyway, the reading of the AR made me think I might order it here in Portugal, mostly to disagree with most of the reviews, but it at least says I'm still alive.
Some rapid comment.
The Roundhouse, now functioning after several false starts. I went to see Norman Mailer and his hangers on in the early '70s in a rather decadent phase. Nice to see it open, bricks and all.
Maybe the Battersea Power Station won't take so long to rehabilitate.
Peter Cook, the ever ready global itinerant, even before globalisation talking about the usual LA, London, Tokyo triangle. Does he ever get tired of global kitsch?
Then to make him feel guilty, a critic about the unsustainable obsession with travel and the tourist trade, with a Dubai type Manhattan waiting for the punters. From Peter Cook to Thomas Cook ... (Nice to know that Thomas Cook started out providing package tours to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851). No relation I'm sure. There does seem to be a reaction to the ease with which we bus around these days and the question of whether it's worthwhile or not. Should we travel so much?
I was surprised that only 12 million will take a holiday in Britain. What happens to the rest of us? Blackpool?
Then, the book review section which mentioned several which I purchased while in London.
Rather old hat though they are.
Hospitals, that was a '60s indeterminacy memory with a different emphasis but since forgotten Alexander, Weeks, Cedric Price, Halbraken ... we all started talking about indeterminacy and change, rather than minimalism and Prada.
Participation, again a much abused word, hardly used in an architectural context these days. Design Classics reminded me of when I bought a Wassily chair from Zeev Aram on the King's Road store. No 53, I think it was. I've still got it, and it cost me £53. Half my subsistence for a term! The King's Road was also quintessential swinging London. You were part of it, just walking from one end to the other. I even married a girl from the Chelsea Kitchen.
Then Prefabrication (Chunking the Future) to take us back to the Archigram plug-in city capsule home concept which rapidly became dormant in England. Portacabin being it closest substitute for the last forty. years. Yona Freidman, Fuller and many other people tried it out. I've still got slides of Jim Stirling's celebrated container homes up north and Ronan Point at the opposite end of the scale. Stirling's stuff was demolished, Ronan Point fell down. Siefert's long empty Centrepoint has just been classified.
Prefabrication is coming back, is it? I might still get to live in a capsule.
How attitudes have changed!
Then, Focus on Portugal, Catherine Slessor must give me a ring next time she does a resumé. We have been pushing skins and prefabrication for years to be totally ignored.
Maybe I'm dying anyway, as all these things were talked about as being the essential stuff of the '60s generation to which I belong.
Maybe the 40 year rule is right. Only after forty years are new ideas put into practice. It seems that we are reinventing the '60s.
Perhaps true, but the trouble is I can't tell whether I have the strength to see it all out again.
Yours etc