MAGGIE’S AT SIXTEEN

Today  (07/11/12) we made a visit to the original Maggie’s Centre, situated on the grounds of Edinburgh’s Western General hospital. Bult by Edinburgh-based Richard Murphy in 1994, in response to a brief provided by Maggie Jencks, it provides an informal drop-in centre for cancer sufferers, and their families, with therapeutic services, health advice, and a kitchen. Between us we knew three of the other Maggie’s: Glasgow, Kirkaldy and Dundee, and we talked to therapists who knew the rest. The architecture of the centres varies a good deal: this one a Victorian stable block as if built by Pippi Longstocking, Dundee (Frank Gehry) is a fairytale gingerbread house, Kircaldy (Zaha Hadid) a grounded stealth bomber. In the Edinburgh case, the starting point, the  Victorian block, has been opened out at ground level with a mezzanine inserted above, leading to alcoves at each end. An eccentric, but well-stocked library fills the central stair. There’s a tropical fish tank, a very good selection of art from the Jencks collection on the walls, and some impeccable Scandinavian modern furniture. Playful, domestic, and low-key, it is a striking contrast to Wilson and Womersley’s adjoining chemotherapy unit (1968), a neo-medieval fortress compete with arrow slits, designed to look as sinister as possible.

We visited the Edinburgh Maggie’s as a therapeutic space.  The design principles are simple and striking, as at all Maggies. THE DOOR. Here, as elsewhere, there’s no ceremony about the entrance, You just walk straight in to the main room, which because of all the glass at ground level is open to view from outside. They used to have a big wooden door, but got rid of it (‘intimidating’). Now it’s glass, like the rest of the adjoining wall. You’re outside, and then you’re in, with no waiting area or reception. The abruptness is slightly shocking, certainly by comparison with the surrounding hospital facilities which are as much facilities for waiting as they are for treatment.  THE TABLE.  The ground floor is open-plan, organised around a central kitchen. The key feature, here as elsewhere is a big table. It’s in some ways a old-fashioned device, suggestive of the semi-public realm of the country house kitchen, or (at the other end of the social scale) the factory canteen. More likely the former, thinking of Jencks. At any rate, it’s a means of allowing different modes of socialisation in the same place. It can be an extroverted, public, place, but as several staff told us, unprompted, it allows an introverted presence too. Some folks just sit there silently, just taking it in, thanking the others when they leave. Like any semi-public space, there are rights and responsibilities. You get given a cup of tea when you first go, then you have to make your own.  THE ALCOVE. Unlike other therapeutic spaces you’re part of a public organisation from the start, with up to seventy visitors per day who by and large see each other and are positively encouraged to socialise.  The are no consulting rooms, or even conventional rooms as such. Instead there are a range of alcoves or recesses which  can – and usually are  – closed with sliding doors during therapeutic sessions, which are, for the most part also scheduled.

A UTOPIAN SPACE. The centre does raise the intriguing possibility of a total therapeutic space, in which distinctions between clients and staff, public and private, work and non-work have been fully dissolved. In this utopian space, everyone, whoever they are, is both giving therapy and receiving it, in full public view, and the distinction between the therapeutic session (50 minutes) and the rest of ones life no longer makes any sense. There’s a curious shadow here of R. D. Laing’s Kingsley House experiment of 1965-70, in which Laing with a zeal that was becoming his trademark, set up a residential facility for schizophrenics and their clinical carers where professional distinctions were simply swept away. Maggie’s could not be more different in spirit, or aim. But it is a faintly utopian operation, redolent of possibilities beyond the immediate question of the care of cancer sufferers. From the perspective of therapy, it is staggeringly open. Most therapeutic spaces are fundamentally anti-social, designed in the belief that clients need to be kept apart from each other at all costs.  Maggie’s is the opposite.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY. We visited on Maggie’s sixteenth birthday, a day of balloons and events. As we were leaving, a Tai-Chi class was underway in the largest space, while by the door, a singer with a guitar ran through a convincing rendition of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’. In this context of life-threatening, and often terminal illness, the line ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ could have been excessively morbid. It wasn’t – in fact it seemed as cheerful as the architecture. If nothing else, that indicates just how different Maggie’s is compared to other kinds of therapeutic space.

For more on the Edinburgh Maggie’s Centre, and Maggie’s in general, go tohttp://www.maggiescentres.org/centres/edinburgh/introduction.html

“CORSON”: THE RULES

“CORSON”: THE RULES

“CORSON” is a game for two players. Players must take the role of either the CUSTOMER or CORSON. The game is played in an old-fashioned hardware shop in Stockbridge, on the North side of Edinburgh. The play has competing objectives. If the player is the CUSTOMER, the objective is simply to buy any item from the shop. If the player takes the role of CORSON, the objective is to prevent the CUSTOMER from making a purchase. Detailed rules follow:

1. The CUSTOMER enters shop and requests an item of hardware normally found in such a shop. Nails, screws, bolts and tools are all typical requests. Toasters, vacuum cleaners and other domestic goods are also acceptable requests. For a request successfully fulfilled by CORSON, the CUSTOMER scores 1 point.

2. CORSON cannot refuse a request for an item he has in stock at the time of play. He may however immediately refuse any request for an item not described in sufficient detail. For example: a request for ‘a nail’ may be refused on the grounds of insufficient detail. Likewise, ‘a toaster’ if it does not specify colour, design etc.

3. CORSON may also legitimately refuse a request on the grounds that the particular item requested is ‘not for sale’, although this move is permitted only once per round.

4. After a failed request, the CUSTOMER is entitled to ask for one further item. The same rules apply.

5. If after two failed requests the customer has not succeeded, he must leave the shop at once. CORSON should smile enigmatically as the CUSTOMER leaves. CORSON scores 1 point. This outcome is of itself known as a ‘Corson’.

6. The ‘ladder’ rule. CORSON may choose to climb a ladder at any point to search for requested items. If CORSON deploys the ladder and fails to find the requested item, double points (2) are awarded. If as the resort of the use of the ladder, the CUSTOMER is successful, then double points are due to the CUSTOMER.

7. The ‘early closing’ rule. CORSON always closes on Wednesday afternoons and Sundays during which time the game may not be played. At any other time, CORSON is entitled once per game to close the shop in order to prevent a sale. No points are awarded to either party in this case.

8. The ‘Parrafin’ rule. The CUSTOMER is entitled, once per game, to ask for ‘parrafin’, an item which CORSON always has in stock. ‘Parrafin’ counts as a successful sale, but no points are awarded to either player in this case.

9. How long to play. The game is played on a weekly basis, over a decade. At the end of each decade, the CUSTOMER and CORSON add up the points scored. Whoever has the largest number of points wins. At this point, players traditionally switch roles.

10. Disputes, and further information. The long duration of the game makes accurate recording of play essential. A notebook for the purpose can be purchased from many retailers in the vicinity, but, it should be stressed, NOT from CORSON himself. Attempts to buy a notebook from CORSON cannot be counted as play. Disputes over play should be directed to The Adjudicator, Board of Corson, 30 Woodburn Terrace, Edinburgh EH10. The Board meets twice per year, and considers all reasonable requests. The Adjudicator also organises an annual Corson Ladder. Entrance to the Ladder is by invitation only, determined by the Board on 1 March each year.

RICHARD SENNETT – TOGETHER

The Guardian journalist Simon Hoggart has a priceless anecdote from this year’s Edinburgh Festival. At a concert at the city’s Usher Hall, the leader of his group conscientiously turns her mobile to silent, leaving a red LED glowing. At the end of the concert, as she gets up to leave, an Edinburgher turns to her and hisses: ‘your red light completely ruined the concert for me.’ For those of us who have to endure the city’s eccentricities year round, it’s a familiar story. Hoggart’s story was, in an unintentional way, pure Sennett: in a single story an index of some favourite problems: civility, etiquette, how we behave in public.

How we behave publicly with each other, and how specifically we co-operate is the subject of Sennett’s latest book Together, whose title is as much an aspiration as it is a description. It’s a subtle, touching, funny, clever book, perfect for discussion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 13 August. In many ways it was a perfect audience for it: well-prepped, middle-class, highly observant – and like Sennett himself, delighting in the musical metaphors that run all the way through the book. Sennett’s love of music and art is obvious. He’s as comfortable in this setting as anyone could be, and as persuasive an advocate as any for what is left of the Enlightenment.

However Sennett’s background is more complex than that of most of the people in the room, and in particular, it involves long journeys in British and American systems of social class, a fact that routinely appears in the writing. Together is also more complex than it might first appear. There’s a lot of familiar Sennett here (civility, the public life, ritual etc) . In the mouths of politicians, ‘civility’ can be a platitude, terrible in its simplicity. Here’s it’s more complex, a system of mutually understood social rules that have to be learned, practised, and that are hard. Politeness, in the eighteenth century sense, is one such a model of civility, a set of mutually understood behavioural rules that facilitate co-operation. Civility has a price, though. All that restraint, from holding in one’s farts in public, to refraining from acting on sexual impulses, is extremely hard work, and has to be practised daily to be effective. Sennett’s recognition of the physical difficulty of civility is a subtle, but important point. There is nothing worse, in some ways, than the presumption of civility without the accompanying understanding that civility, through simple human frailty, cannot always be achieved. (in Simon Hoggart’s place, I would have resorted to violence for precisely this reason).

But in Sennett’s subtle imagination, civility does not automatically mean restraint. In an anecdote that both troubled and fascinated the Edinburgh audience, Sennett described a 70s Boston factory in the 1970s, where a shop floor foreman had to show anger periodically to garner respect: ‘bland, polite foremen were the greater goad.’ In this particular version of civility, the threat of violence was an integral part of the mutually understood system. It’s a highly suggestive idea that conflicts with the popular concept of civility as etiquette.

It is also – it goes without saying – a troubling idea that in the wrong hands amount could, and no doubt often did underwrite bullying. A different, less privileged audience, might have had things to say about this, as they might about the equally slippery notion of impersonality. Sennett’s long-held view is that we suffer an excess of intimacy in public life which of itself corrodes public-ness. (Another sociologist, Frank Furedi, has written of a widespread ‘therapy culture’ that prevents large-scale, and necessarily impersonal action). In the professional context of the university, I couldn’t agree more There is nothing that frustrates academic life so much as personalisation. I wonder, however, if the attractions of impersonality might lessen in a situation where (for the sake of argument) workers were hired on a daily basis, where, in other words, intimacy was structurally impossible.

The conversation was certainly developing in these directions when, the Book Festival being what it is, we had to stop, Sennett, I’m sure would have had some subtle and inventive answers to these questions. It was short performance, but a great one.  In the meantime, we await the last part of his Homo Faber trilogy, on the City.

 

Richard Sennett appeared at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 13 August, 2012, chaired by Richard Williams. Sennettt’s book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-Operation, is published by Allen Lane.

Richard Sennett, Edinburgh Book Festival, 13/08/12

I’m chairing Richard Sennett’s talk on his new book ‘Together’, Edinburgh Book Festival, Monday 13 August, 8.30pm. For tickets and further information, see http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/

For more on Sennett himself, go to: http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=1

Glasgow International, 2062

‘It is a wet afternoon in Glasgow, May 2062. The temperature is barely six degrees above freezing, the Clyde has burst its banks as is now customary for this time of year, and is lapping about the entrance to the old Central Station, now the R. D. Laing Cultural Exploratorium. The upper floors are a museum, the ground level a hydroponic research gardens. The red iron-rich waters lapping around the station’s baroque entrance have become one of the sights of the city.

The rain is incessant, but Glasgow is buoyant. The GI (how old-fashioned the acronym sounds now – as if ‘international’ still means something) has just opened, now well into its sixth decade. Its legendary founder, and now honorary President has just made an appearance at the show’s opening in a climate controlled inflatable. At 95, she is remarkably sprightly, and makes a point of attending each opening in person rather than as the more usual hologram. Alcohol has been banned by the Scottish Government, but on special occasions such as this one, a state of mild intoxication is permitted by the authorities. officials from the Diageo-run local government administer a ‘whisky patch’, a sticking plaster which if placed correctly on the arm administers a drug that briefly simulates the effect of a drink. For a few moments, everyone’s happy.

GI has in its six decades been an astonishing success. So much so the city has now entirely forgotten its industrial past. The only memory now is of a city of creative types, the dominant image of the place since 1990. Its surviving 19th century architecture only connotes ‘loft-ness’ now, and even that idea seems hopelessly quaint. Everyone is an artist of one kind or another, or involved in servicing the art business. It employs rather more than shipbuilding did in its heyday, not that there is any living memory of that. (The Riverside museum, designed by a long-forgotten architect Zaha Hadid, it was said, contained a collection of ship models, but no-one understood what they were, or how they had got there. The museum itself closed decades ago when it was discovered its livid green interior poisoned visitors) and abandoned like the entire Clyde estuary. Its University was long ago taken over by the School of Art and now has 40,000 students, mainly from central Asian oil states.

Where are the poor? Edinburgh, mainly, with a few hundred thousand transported to compounds in the intermediate city of Cumbernauld when it became the capital in 2030. A few remain to staff the popular Museum of the Welfare State in a preserved Gorbals high-rise, a few to the Gallery of the Poor at the old Barras market, but otherwise they’re gone. Glasgow has been taken over by Art.

This has had some odd consequences. With 1.2 million artists in one place you get an astonishingly high rate of coffee drinking (the highest rate of consumption in the world), the world’s highest rate of solo living, the greatest concentration of psychotherapists, the most single-speed bicycles (a revival of an early-21st century fad), the dissipation of almost any sense of collectivity, the world’s lowest birthrate. The children have mostly gone and the schools closed. The huge population increase has been achieved through in-migration, lately from the declining art capitals of Berlin, Beijing and Delhi (the migration from ruinously expensive Manhattan happened in the 2030s).

What of the art? There’s real nostalgia for 2012 in the profile of the bouncy castle. Then, as some of the more elderly visitors might recall, Jeremy Deller showed Sacrilege, a life-sized inflatable Stonehenge. That’s been reconstructed here at its original Glasgow Green site. But that piece, a one-liner, pales by comparison with the scale and ambition of the other works: the City Chambers, University and Kelvingrove replaced by convincing, life-size pneumatic versions ( in the case of City Chambers, fully functional too). Meanwhile, Buchanan St has been lined in latex rubber, and most spectacularly of all, the long-defunct Glasgow subway remade, life-size, as a helium balloon. The largest inflatable constructed in history, the size of two dozen Hindenburgs, it floats, implausibly, at an altitude of 300ft, aerially marking the subway’s route. At a smaller scale, Glasgow’s prowess in inflatables is represented by the 1,000 or students on GSA’s MSc in Pneumatic Studies. Their work is everywhere- it’s impossible to move without bouncing. Meanwhile elsewhere in further nods to 2012, Sauchiehall St has become a temporary museum of cake art, while in the ruins of the old Symphony Hall, the SSO has been replaced by a full sized robotic version, which visitors can ‘play’.

It’s a strange place, this new Glasgow. I stop off near Barras Museum to buy some cuttlefish sashimi from a man dressed as a penguin. He is that rare thing these days, a Glaswegian. What does he think of it all? Well, there’s plenty of money about, he says, glancing over at a gang of North Korean artists dressed as ‘normals’ (a new fad – creative types pretending to be insurance clerks, noisily affecting artlessness). ‘We’re richer than we’ve ever been.’ ‘But they’ – and he looks over at the artists again – ‘just treat us a background. We’re just for decoration these days.’ ‘And that – he looks up at the six-mile inflatable subway, hovering improbably above our heads – ‘I just don’t know, I really don’t…’ As he speaks, an electric biplane take another gaggle of tourists on a loop-the-loop around this floating leviathan. How can they top this?

Granton update

My ECA colleague Robert Davies just sent me some links on Granton’s history and proposed future, so for balance and fairness, here they are. His large format photographs of the area and its stalled development are great, too. My original blog on the topic is ‘A Monumental Fuck-Up’.

Click to access efpr1028.pdf

http://www.waterfront-ed.com/info/The-Master-Plan.aspx
http://map.avinet.no/website/edinburgh/plans/eclp/chap11.htm
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/info/207/planning-policies/1059/area_development_frameworks/2

A Monumental Fuck-Up

The news that one of Edinburgh’s more convincing new developments, Quartermile, had changed hands for a fraction of what was hoped for made me want to look again at some of the city’s other attempts at regeneration. If Quartermile, with is central location, its Foster masterplan, and Swedish coffee-house, was doing so badly, what of more peripheral developments? It turned out some ECA friends had been thinking along the same lines, toying with the idea of the ‘ruin’ in relation to stalled development. So on a freezing Saturday morning we set out for Granton.

The northern coastline had been the subject of numerous plans since the 1990s, with a major initiative in 2006 led by Llewelyn-Davies imagining the entire waterfront from Leith to Cramond as a boulevard, lines with cafes, smart flats, and opportunities for bathing. It’s not such a bad idea: the Forth is chilly, but the views are good, and the existing promenade at Cramond is handsome and well-used. I remember the first bits of the plan well – a well-proportioned pavilion by Fosters for Scottish Gas, some decent neo-modernist flats by Reiach and Hall nearby, some promising landscaping. It was highly fragmentary to say the least, but the good bits were not at bad. I liked the look of the townhouses enough to pick up a brochure. It was all certainly plausible. I had moved not long previously from Hulme in inner-city Manchester and was prepared to see beyond the provisional, scruffy surface of any regen site.

Six years on, my colleagues and I met at Granton harbour to see how things were getting on. The straight answer was that they weren’t. If anything, they seemed to be going backwards, At the harbour, a clutch of 8-10 story slabs poked out of the ground, barely occupied as far as we could tell. But worse, for the residents, their outlook was of stalled construction and security fences, and lakes of festering garbage. For us tourists it was bad enough – but if you’d paid £400k for a penthouse and were looking at this…

I knew from my Hulme experience that such thing were tolerable if they represented progress – a busy construction site was an eminently cheery thing. Here, however, the dereliction represented stasis. Nothing was happening, and did not appear to have happened for years. Our guide, a photographer with a keen knowledge of the area outlined a litany of failure. Everything had stalled or gone into reverse; a bunch of developers had gone bust; blocks of flats lay unoccupied; no new development was likely to happen. The flats that had been built were falling to bits (we saw evidence). He invoked an American artist of the 60s, Robert Smithson, whose sardonic commentaries on the New York City described a civilisation in terminal, entropic, decline. Granton was like that, he thought. It was hard not to disagree. As long as there was activity, Granton’s fragmented urbanism could – on a sunny day – be imagined as part of something in the making. On a day like this, though, its fragmentary quality signified only dissolution.

How on earth had this happened? How could a place as wealthy and privileged as Edinburgh get this so badly wrong? How could it screw up so monumentally at the height of a property boom? And with land supply among the tightest in Europe? And how could this project – Edinburgh’s flagship regeneration scheme – be left in a condition of stasis? There is no forward plan at the time of writing, a bid for £84m TIF infrastructure funding having failed late last year. That, combined with a flat housing market, and the curtailing of the trams project, means no hope for Granton. As cock-ups go, this one hasn’t had anything like the publicity of the trams, or the Parliament. But if anything it’s more serious – can the city get anything right? Seems not.

For the backstory on Granton see http://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/granton_harbour.htm
http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/news/article/140/edinburgh_gets_go_ahead_for_84m_waterfront_funding

Let’s Demolish the New Town!

Referendum or not, an independent Scotland now seems inevitable. So what might its architecture look like? The SNP-led government this year is about to issue a new policy, but I thought I’d get my policy in first. Here’s what it ought to say:

(1) Demolish the New Town. Just about everything built in Scotland in the past half-century has been timid, and second-rate. I’ve no idea why. Edinburgh and Glasgow were architecturally among the boldest cities in the world once. Then they just gave up, Edinburgh first, then after Red Road (above), Glasgow. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with wealth. Edinburgh’s been awash with money the past decade, and still is. But it has built hardly anything with it. I think demolishing Edinburgh’s New Town might help. It’s great, but that’s the problem – as long as it exists, no-one can think of anything better. So let’s knock it down. (it also monumentalises a hierarchical, class-ridden model of society that should have no place in a new Scotland).

(2) Tell UNESCO to shove off. It’s a terrible organisation that fossilizes cities in the name of art. If you don’t believe me, try reading one of their deadly reports. The loss of UNESCO status would be one of the best things that could happen to Edinburgh. Scotland isn’t, and certainly shouldn’t be, a museum. Of course, point (2) would be neatly dealt with by point (1)

(4) Instigate a ’30-year rule’, whereby all buildings have to be demolished and rebuilt once they reach that age. They could be rebuilt in the same style, if you insist, but they’d incorporate new technology and materials as they develop. Everyone would benefit.

(5) Forget about Scandinavia, so last century – small, stuffy, over-regulated, and just too dark. Its best architects, like Aalto, did their best stuff once they left. Let’s emulate somewhere that’s actually alive, like Brazil. PS: I had a Saab once and it was rubbish.

(6) Stop the obsession with the facade, with being ‘in keeping’ with the neighbours. Isn’t this the picture of the worst sort of conformity? And doesn’t it stop simple technological improvements to buildings by insisting on historical conformity? In 2005, I’d have replaced all the windows on my architecturally mediocre 1935 Edinburgh flat. Couldn’t do it because of ‘window control’ which meant replacement had to be like-for-like, i.e. wooden sash-and-case (in 2005!). It was cheaper to buy a new flat, which is what I did.

(6) tear up the green belt. Scotland’s got more land than it knows what to do with, but one of the world’s most tightly regulated land supplies. Result: daft prices, lack of innovation, and green-belt leapfrogging.

(7) Let’s have fun. How about some, you know, colour?

Of course, the new policy won’t say any of that. Judging by the existing policies (http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Built-Environment), and what my spies tell me, I think we can expect New Urbanism with windmills. But it’ll get harder, rather than easier to build anything. Run to the hills!