David Barrie

Peripheral porn (in Hartlepool)

Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen once defined tourism as involving movement from the cultural centre to the periphery.

In the North Sea port town of Hartlepool, England, park up on the edge of town, pass under a railway bridge, head towards the sea and you fall across this:

It's called Steetley Refractories.

The site of a factory that once extracted magnesia from the sea and reacted it with dolomite deposits in giant tubs, tanks and kilns.

This is what the site looked like in the 1960s.

And this is it today, a floor show of vast blue lagoons that push for attention as land art.

The BBC reports that there are plans to turn the site in to luxury flats.

But for the moment, it remains a classic English example of what Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of  The Center for Land Use Interpretation calls the contemporary landscape as museum.

And a way better piece of cinema than either Mongol or Prom Night.

For directions, go here.

Judgement of Paris

Rubens is my favorite painter of all time.

And this picture - The Judgement of Paris - is one of his greatest.

But forget all talk of composition, shape, form, blah blah - and any other pompous conoisseur catalogue stuff. 

For from the chasms of the Internet, by an artist of no known name, comes a perfectly executed version of the story that may express far more accurately what was really going on when Hermes brought the son of Priam beautiful goddesses to judge.

I can see through you

All day, every day, people are telling us what we should think.

And loads of things that are labelled 'empowerment' are fairly (and sadly) obvious exercises in pushing people around.

From John Riedl and Joseph Konstan's brilliant book on collaborative filtering, comes a pious thought from mathematician Blaise Pascal that's worth remembering in an age of super-smart messaging and fairly loose use (and abuse) of the 'E' word:

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Image from Danske via Flickr.

God Save the Queen

In London, we have a very large but very local architectural problem:

In last weekend's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting basked in the early Summer sun and asked a simple question: why can't Londoners use Buckingham Palace - especially its gardens?

While Green Park is used by up to a million people a month in the summer, right next door a park of near-comparable size remains largely empty; pristine lawns behind 10ft brick walls, bristling with barbed wire and metal spikes....

Buckingham Palace Gardens is the largest private green space in central London. (It's all the area to the left of the picture above...)

Its forty acres of fine garden, lakes, two thousand animal species and flamingos were once common ground when the Palace was plain old Buckingham House in the early eighteenth century.

Today, surrounded by walls, wire, speakers and surveillance cameras, it is in the words of architect Sir Terry Farrell, an essay in

bad neighborliness...Either the monarchy is paternal and they share in a paternal way and we enjoy it; or they are behind walls, and it is us and them.

Several years ago, Terry and me made a documentary film arguing that it was time to turn the forecourt of the Palace in to a 'world square' and puncture its architectural front:

And replace the walls that surround the Palace grounds with railings and allow public access:

Architect and writer Charles Jencks fell in to our ranks, seeing the building as like a Hollywood stage set, 

a very uptight facade that says nothing. The message is all to do with control...It is as if being a monarch was a real pain. And dangerous!...Being a monarch cannot always be a burden. It should be a celebration.

But royalist Lord St John of Fawsley lumped us in with an alternative aristocracy and gave us a terrifying glimpse of an ancient ax:

Along come these architects and intellectuals and others who really do not understand what people are like, with these mad crazy schemes. Well, away with them! In another age they would have been sent to the Tower!

I wasn't sent to the Tower.

And the idea hasn't developed.

The message:

We may be adapting physical and metaphorical landscapes throughout the world, de-commissoning and re-commissioning 'place' - but there are limits.

Politicians and designers may be busy re-defining the role of service providers and promoting inclusion - but there are limits.

And the monarchy is serving the nation in many ways other than exclusivity - but it has its limits.

Fact is that our idea of monarchy remains captive to the idea of magic and awe of the private landed upper class.

The Windsors find it difficult to link leadership, value and play.

And assets such as the Palace and its gardens are classified as a 'home' - i.e. a private, not a public asset. 

I told you that it was a local problem.

Suffice it to say: God Save the Queen!

42 Ways to say no

Just when you might be lost for words, conceptual artist Mel Bochner comes to the rescue in a piece (resolutely) called No, currently on show at the Peter Freeman Gallery, New York.  (via Frieze).

Crunching on credit

It was on this parade of shops in Whitechapel, London in the 1970s, in a kosher restaurant called Blooms, that I had my first gherkin.

The British call the cucumber a Wally which is a bit of a shame since - in shape at least - it has graced the gardens of the Chatsworth House stately home in Derbyshire, England.

In some weird twist of fate, the (slightly) uncouth vegetable turned totally luxe when someone decided to call Norman Foster's chic Swiss Re building in the City of London "The Gherkin".

 

But now thanks to Norm and financial journalist Chris Blackhurst, the small, bitter and not actually very pleasant gurka has come of age.

Writing in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], Blackhurst turns Foster's building in to a ready reckoner for measuring demand and supply of office space in the City of London.

Everywhere I go, should I meet any property developer with an interest in the Square Mile, the chat quickly gets on to the Gherkin.

So we've had a warning of 40,000 City job losses - or the equivalent of eight Gherkins (500,000 sq ft each, at 100 sq ft per person).

Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers analyst Mike Prew has calculated that a total of "11 Gherkins" are being built by developers.

All hail the Gherkin!

The indigestible cucumber has become as august a measure as the Roman Mile or French meridional definition.

5000 people = 1 Gherkin

30 people = a nibble on an indigestible stalk end.

Image of Whitechapel High Street, courtesy of Danny McL. Chatsworth, courtesy of  Dr Loplop.  Gherkin packers in Bangalore, courtesy of Lefranz. Foster's Gherkin, courtesy of  acampm1.