David Barrie

Eggplant Street

This is a view of the St Hilda's area of the town of Middlesbrough in north east England.

Here's American artist Fritz Haeg in a recent article suggesting a way to disrupt urban experience:

What if we turned over entire suburban streets to migrant farm workers who would remove all the lawns on one street and all the families would agree to it - and it would be the Eggplant Street. You'd have this really diverse series of crops in all these front yards and the farmers would tend them, grow them, and all the families would get free produce, and the farmers would be employed, and they could all sell food too because you'd grow more food than the families could eat by far.

I'm taking Haeg out of context. And St Hilda's is hardly a suburb.

But what about combining the two and proposing a productive edible purpose for spaces in front of people's houses across the developed world?

The Pain and the Itch

The Pain and the Itch is a great play by writer Bruce Norris, currently being performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London. It is the funniest, most acid piece of social satire I have ever seen: a wholesale destruction of the values and hypocrisies of the aspirational middle class. It has had outstanding reviews.

Early on in the play, set in America, plastic surgeon Cash makes a perfect observation on the emotional tangle people get in to around wealth:

See, in this country, some of the rich people, you see, they feel very guilty. They feel so frivolous. They feel ashamed. They think , oh no, people are starving, and they can't enjoy how rich they are because they feel so tacky. They say, if we were really good people we'd give everything away. But the truth is, they don't really want to give away their stuff. Their golf clubs and their fifty-two-inch TV.  Not to some starving illiterate natives in some desert somewhere. Not really. See, they feel bad because what they practise doesn't square with what they preach. Which makes them every bit as bad as the materialistic barbarians they despise! And you want  to say to these people: hey, you don't have to change what you practise. That's way too hard. Just change what you fucking preach.

"Dolly, Good. Hernia, Bad"

Hilarious branding from Budget Van Rental, U.S.A.:

Smooth space

For time immemorial, I've been trying to understand why and how we can orientate ourselves in immense, featureless, self-effacing spaces and landscapes like this one. And how and why standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert some years ago was a disorientating but invigorating experience.   

Austrian architect and artist Lars Koretzky offers a clue in his recent book devoted to movement, the impressions within and between spaces in cities and lines that he sees swirling around. (!)

Koretzy quotes philosopher  Gilles Deleuze and psychotherapist Felix Guattari's investigations of 'striated' and 'smooth space' in their book A Thousand Plateaus: two spatial arrangements with two systems: one that is State-oriented and static, the other nomadic and fluid.

In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points:one goes from one point to another. In smooth space, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory...In the smooth space, the line is a vector, a direction and not a dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local operations involving changes in direction....smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed or perceived things. It is a space of affects more than one of properties. Whereas in the striated, forms organize matter: in the smooth, materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than an extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties.

In 2002, I visited the Western Desert of Egypt to make a documentary on nomadism and the design of the Pyramids.

When I stood in front of the enormity of the landscape, I felt as though I was distributing myself across the space, almost surfing.

Now (maybe) I start to know why. It was a 'smooth space', occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities.

Not quite a handbag

When I was in China a few weeks ago, I came across a great book. It's a no-holds-barred picture-book account of Taiwanese chat-show hostess Xu Xi-di's pregnancy: from first meeting, to dating, to delivery suite and beyond. It closes with a song from Xi-di to her new husband  entitled You are my Angel and burnt on a CD tucked in the back sleeve of the book.

But what caught my attention were the images of Xi-di on the front and back covers - here's the front:

A fantastic bit of baby accessorizing - almost, but not quite, a good alternative to a red patent handbag.

What's just as bizarre is that pre-dilation, Clarins appears to have already understood the value of Xi-di's fertility.

Personalizing the brand

Is it my over-fertile imagination, or is there something fab about stores like this in Kilwinning, Ayrshire? I came across it during some kind of weird, counter-cultural tour of a bombed out corner of the U.K.

Who's Chloe? Does she sell buttons, cakes, corn dollies, or something all together more satanic?

For sure, whoever runs the store is up there with Dolce & Gabbana, McQueen and Ferrari, when it comes to realizing the value and meaning of personalizing the brand.

Also, just by giving the store a first name, the owner's tuning up the chances of the street becoming a social playing field.

Building bridges

This is a picture of a new bridge under construction in Castleford, Yorkshire, U.K. It's part of a public realm renewal project that has been followed by TV company Talkback Thames and will be broadcast in a series of Grand Designs-style documentaries by Channel 4 Television in 2008.

One reason why people say that the project has been a success is that it has created a movement for local change and a clear development platform for the town.

Civic participation was not just hard-wired in to the core capital programme but also reinforced and extended by an ancillary programme of local activity.

And it was this whole-hearted, holistic effort that has delivered success.

Laurajane Smith, an archaeologist at the University of York, has picked up on the theme of civic identity, heritage and renewal in a thought-provoking way. She devotes a chapter in a recent book to the extraordinary involvement of people in the former coal-mining town in their past, present and future and features the work of The Castleford Project.

Laurajane's book suggests that by exposing and expressing the identity of a town and seeing the environment as an expression of culture, the project has helped enable a process that's sustainable, personal and reflective of enduring ideas of change and renewal.

In the massive work and investment around the world in work that calls itself 'regeneration', this is often a missing link.

There's an article on the project by me at architectural e-magazine Monumenta. I led the initiative between 2003 and 2005. And there's more on the wider context of urban renewal here and co-design here.

Tedious masterpieces

This the work of Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss.

I was trying to work out the other day why it is that I am always choosing beautiful pictures of the banal as my favorites on Flickr.

Also, why sometimes people calling for new, imaginative things annoy me: like think-tank Demos' recent  call for  mass imagination programmes as an answer to formulaic regeneration projects.

Then I remembered the work of these two, brilliantly described in a book by film-maker John Waters as

a shockingly tedious, fair-to-middling, nothing-to-write-home-about, new kind of masterpiece.

The 'beauty' of Fischli & Weiss' work to me is that they nudge towards new strategies for navigating oceans of novelty and suggest that there's value in logistics, not just product. An antidote to times a-trembling with £10m+ diamond-encrusted skulls.