I have just seen a television report on a revolutionary new development in dining out. A restaurant in Germany has dispensed with its waiters and utilises instead a system of automated ordering and delivering of dishes. A monitor on every dining table allows access to a pictorial menu. The punters enter their choice via a keyboard, together with payment details. The machine issues a receipt while the order goes to a team of chefs in a remote kitchen. The chefs prepare the order which is returned directly to the diners in a container that helter-skelters down a track not unlike a miniature fairground rollercoaster.

It’s a wonderful system, explains the beaming proprietor. No more having to train and pay waiting staff. No more chaos when a waiter fails to show up. And no more tipping bad service by the punter. No-one asked redundant waiting staff to comment but I doubt if they would greet the idea with the same enthusiasm. However there is no question that their means to a living is over. For starters – sorry! – the apparatus has to be bought and maintained, and what if it breaks down?

And the punters have to tolerate this strange spiralling machinery rising from their table up to the ceiling. It all rather smacks of Modern Times, that film where Charlie Chaplin struggles to maintain his human identity while trapped in a series of machine episodes. Admittedly it does have a type of futuristic beauty. But I can only ever see it lending itself to a novelty night out. An intimate atmosphere in a conventional restaurant with handsome, black-coated waiters has a long way to roll yet.

Home and Away

In a corner of Surrey builders have got the go-ahead to build two modernist houses, pending the demolishment of an existing property on the site. I quote: The two 6000 sq ft houses…will symmetrically reflect each other and were labelled beautiful by the Kingston design panel.

I have scrutinised the CGI’s of the planned buildings and they do indeed answer to the call of beauty. Even so, objections to the buildings are already flying, among them that the houses are too big, that they will affect the water supply, that they are not in keeping with the area, Coombe Hill, which is a conversation area and that they are too close to one another. I quote Councillor Codd, a chairman on the planning committee: There is barely a sixpence between them. If I was paying £3.4 million, I’d want more garden.

I find the last objection rather curious. Not having spoken to Councillor Codd, it is difficult to know what is at the back of his statement. But surely the casting vote there is up to the paying punter. If the homes don’t sell then the loser is the builder and the citizens of Kingston will be left with two beautiful white – and glass – elephants to gaze upon. The issues of water supply and conservation should be addressed of course, but someone – me – should tell Councillor Codd that the typical modernist dweller is not likely to be obsessed with gardening but anxious to possess a home that boasts a birds’ eye view of its natural surroundings – be it town or country – in the manner of the occupants of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye.

Entries taken from the Kingston Guardian, 3 April, 2008.

The Dark Side of Technology

In this column I have frequently written on how modernism would not have been possible without advances in technology, e.g., the mass production of glass. And modernism has made certain technological developments more palatable, e.g., fluorescent lighting, plastic, the motor car.

But there is a dark side to technology. There are the CCTV cameras, reportedly one for every fourteen of the population, that can observe ‘bad’ behaviour but have failed utterly to eradicate it. And then there are those frightful subsonic alarms that assault the eardrums of anyone aged under twenty, just for being there.

But the weirdest notion yet has been brought to my notice by the publication of a new book by writer Paul Kingsnorth Real England: the Battle Against The Bland (Portobello Books), of a development in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Apparently there is a network of underground walkways and tunnels accessible to those with passwords – and you have to pay to get a password.

Maybe there is something I don’t know about the system but it sounds like it is designed to give the better-off access to ‘protected’ areas and to consign everyone else to the crime and pollution of the rude streets. And all made possible by chip-and-pin technology. Could it happen here? As Confucius said, there are interesting times ahead. Watch this space

Four Decades On

Four decades on I still don’t know what the students in Paris were protesting about. Nor do I fully understand the political forces behind the Prague Spring. But I do understand more about the nature of protest itself; those stirrings of dissatisfaction with the status quo that makes one want to rock the boat, turn the tables and chuck out the chintz – forever.

Politicizing the building has always been a little dangerous. One runs the risk of being equated with the National Socialist, i.e., Nazi drive to ban all forms of subversive or modernist architecture in 1930s Germany in favour of a retro, neo-Classical style. Yet it is difficult not to equate modernism in architecture with new ways of thinking and radical politics. Four decades on from ‘Glorious ‘68’, it is worth thinking about the changes that revolution has wrought upon architecture.

Modernism and alienation

Alienation is more easily experienced than described. If you have ever surveyed the perimeter of a modernist building, queasily wondering where the entrance door is, you will have experienced it. Or if you have simply dashed on board an underground train only to find yourself headed in the wrong direction, north instead of south or east instead of west, then you have been a victim of the banal side of modernism.

Some time ago I sat in a taxi while the driver related to me how one day, while she had been driving around a ‘new’ town she had picked up an elderly lady who was trying to find her way to her son’s house. The lady was staying with her son as a guest and had decided to go for a walk and visit the shops all at once.

On her return journey she had taken a wrong turning and was now totally confused, wandering up and down streets lined with rows and rows of similar houses. She had neglected to take an address with her, not imagining at the outset of her journey that she would need one. The adventure ended when, from her passenger seat, she spotted her son walking along looking worriedly for her. The point of this story is obvious, so obvious that it needs to be told again and again.

On being like Basildon

‘This is just like Basildon’ I overheard a woman say, as I strolled with a friend through the Brunswick Centre, that cite of super-modernist architecture in the heart of London. It could have been the run-down condition of the housing stock, or maybe the proximity of classical Russell Square and nearby Brunswick Square is just too heavy for the Centre to carry.

My value judgements are useless here. If the woman found the Brunswick Centre to ‘be like Basildon’, then it was for her and that was that. Of course, the real question is, does being like Basildon mean it’s good or bad? Maybe being like Basildon is a desirable state? Somehow I doubt if the woman’s interjection was meant to be complimentary. There was the dubious tone of her voice, to begin with. And when last did anyone compare Russell Square with Bedford Square, and Bedford Square with Hanover Square? We just accept these as places in their own right. We can do because they all have a strong sense of place.

And that is what is missing from many modernist precincts, a sense of place. Too often modernist flagships blocks and buildings are devoid of a sense of place.

Man and machine

Modernism and technology are inseparable. Le Corbusier wrote of the house as a machine for living in his 1925 book, Vers une Architecture. If anyone was going to foresee a time when the domestic home became a unit of integrated, functioning technologies as well as a roof over one’s head, it was this Swiss visionary.

As the twentieth century rolled forward, technology burgeoned to encompass every function of our lives. We have technologies for heating, lighting, cooking, cleaning, entertainment, communication…I could go on. Just lately technology has spilled over into ecology. Solar panels promise ‘green’ energy and an increasing number of homes have their own water and refuse recycling systems.

Gone, however, are those silly, futuristic scenarios from the ‘sixties, promising us homes that were actual robots dictating every area of life from what time to get up in the morning to what we ate for breakfast, dinner and supper. For me, this is a good thing. I do not relish an electronic dictator of either gender supervising my morning bath or counting every calorie I eat.

On the other hand, I long for a housekeeping automaton, cleaning and dusting on a daily basis but without interfering with my intimate life. Maybe we are getting there. After all, what else are thermostats and washing machines, fridge-freezers and timed cookers but robots of a sort? And now I hear that ‘they’ are making robot-type vacuum cleaners that suck up the dust without being driven by human hands – bliss!

All we need now is a robot to make kitchen and bathroom surfaces shine and gleam, and another one to iron the clothes with crisp precision. I’ve said before and I’ll say again, the true modernist is in control of her machines and her life. She will not allow objets or circumstances dictate her situation – she takes charge of them! Got to go now to answer my bleeping mobile.

Mary Phelan