Listing, Like A Ship

“God, imagine the last thing you saw on this earth was Preston Bus Station.”

That might be the wittiest remark in the hundreds of comments to Owen Hatherley's report in the Guardian about the listing of the Preston Bus Station by English Heritage in late September. The remark was made by a commenter who claimed to be a local Lancashire lad, and was in reference to the (perhaps-apocryphal) tales of repeated, or even regular, suicide jumpers who ascended to the top parking level of the bus station to leap to their deaths. If not directly driven to do so by the horror of the building itself, at least the depressed were driven by the misery-inducing place to their end.  Busses weren't the only things departing from the station, it seems. 

The gallows humor in the comments sections contrasts with Hatherley's own triumphant celebration of the Grade II Listing in the article itself. The commenters, especially those who reported to be from or lived in Preston, were nearly universal in their disdain for the misery-inducing Bus Station, although there were many who loved the building, echoing the lyrical celebration that rises in protest song each time demolition has been threatened—stretching at least as far back as Jonathan Gancey's typically-overdone “A Baroque Catherdral for Buses” passion from 2007.

What many of the disgruntled seemed to complain about was the disconnect between the non-local architectural enthusiasts, who appeared quick to defend any large building made of concrete in the middle of the 20th century. Others seems to judge simply on sight of image search results: mesmerizing photographs of a half-kilometer stacks of ribbed concrete panels, as elegantly imposing as an underlit steamship, or silently striking in its simplicity as Roman ruin. 

It is possible to find gorgeous photographs of the Preston Bus Station, of which the above might currently be the most familiar and the most exultant. But it is one of a class that focus on just a single, if most prominent, aspect of the building: the megastructural “swoop” of the parking levels— this is also the subject and styling of the close-in lithograph, below, celebrating the building as a modern monument of Britain from indie shop We Are Dorothy, along with the now-gone Tricorn Centre and the nearby Forton Services.


(Incidentally, these four upper levels actually don't have anything directly to do with bussing, but instead are for automobiles. The boarding and disembarking of busses occurs only on the building's ground floor. In this sense, the Bus Station has more in common with, say Paul Rudolph's Temple Street Parking in New Haven)

You will find few illustrations accompanying laudatory adulations for the building that exhibits the interior of the bus station. This is problem: a particular angle, revealing a uniquely-attractive visual circumstance, does not make a great building. A building needs to lend more to the heritage of architecture than it's exterior elevation, especially a municipal utility in an economically-blighted city. The question should not be whether the Preston Bus Station should be saved but, something more along the lines of, can Preston's circumstance be improved by saving the Preston Bus Station? Follow-up question: What does "Saving the Bus Station" actually mean? 

Several months before the Listing was announced, I happened to be traveling north across Britain, and was able to spend a half hour exploring this landmark (like many, I had long ago in my early architectural education seen a startling picture of the exterior). I knew so little about the building other than its place in brutalist history, I was excited to see it and curious about what made its so well-known.

On a very overcast, breezy afternoon, not a cold day but still drab, I arrived at the Preston Bus Station (not by bus). The bus station is ringed with concrete at its base, as either side is a wide tarmac for coaches to maneuver and park. In much the same way as an airport's apron can make for exciting viewing, the bustling of the departing motor coaches makes for momentary enjoyable viewing, although its not exactly watching jumbo jets hurtling down the runway and launching up into the sky, next to touch ground in Asia or Africa.  

I didn't have time to explore the town of Preston properly, but I can concur with the Guardian and Daily Mail commenters that this section of town is pretty depressing. With the bus terminal in the center of a vast plaza of asphalt, the arrangement nearly mimics the main square of a central European city, but this one ringed by exceedingly sad buildings, a half-dead shopping plaza with more surface parking, some abandoned buildings, and some contemporary 1970s mid-rises that constitute the Skyline of Preston, I suppose. 

The most proximate building is a truly gawd-awful Holiday Inn, the sort of lodging that causes the very word “hotel” to sink over the years from youthful associations with the adventuresome excitement of travel to the banal drudgery of lonely business trips of adulthood. The Holiday Inn's only acknowledgement of the Bus Station is as a sort of central dent between two wings of rooms, as if the long brutal battery had rammed the sad hotel tower.

Welcome!

To enter the building itself is a mean task. The above, I kid you not, is the ground-level entrance. At least, as I found it in May 2013. I have no idea if this a temporary condition due to some renovation, as there are bay numbers above the doors suggesting that busses formerly pulled up at this spot. I believe the only other way for pedestrians to access the station is a series of subterranean passageways or overhead bridges. Is there a more terrible space of modern life than an underground pedestrian tunnel to the bus station? 

Bridge of Sighs.

How to get…at…the building?

Inside the building was the grand finale of the slowly-increasing awfulness of the whole experience. I'll put aside whether traveling by bus is uplifting in and of itself or not; I only took a few pictures partly because the light was so low and partly because all these sad, creepy people were milling around with nothing to do but stare at me and my camera. 

What's Exit Town?

The interior hall is a preservationists dream, both in the sense that civilization has moved on from constructing spaces like this, and also it's hard to see anything that has been touched in decades, from the seating to the signage, the murky glazing to the worn wooden guardrails. The whole contemporary updates were the snacks in the smelly shop and the commercial branding of the private stagecoach companies. 

I left the building after walking through once: again, a surface-level crossing in which pedestrians have to mind that busses don't run them over. There wasn't any place immediate to go to; and the collection of strange street furniture, like the nearly art-deco white tiled abandoned taxi circus, and the landscaped berms, and all the fencing, made immediate interaction with the edges of the structure so unnerving. Also, there was nowhere to go outside building, except if you were unlucky enough to be booked at the Holiday Inn. 

Neighbors.

What enthusiasts’ emotions don't encompass, and precisely what the Listing does not address, are these very central and urgent problems of the building: that it is difficult and unpleasant to approach, to be in, to use, and to leave. Secondly, that it is in bad shape, and thirdly that it is surrounded by ugliness. The first fundamental set of issues aren't acknowledged by the pro-preservationists; the last two are cast off as outside the scope of the matter. But precisely because making any positive intervention in the maintenance of the building itself or its immediate setting is outside of the bounds of Listing is precisely what is wrong with Listing. 

If the building is truly worth preserving, and if that preservation has any value, it should be accompanied by the launch of a campaign to maximally increase the pleasant aspects of itself and its environment. That so many types of Listing in fact do much the opposite, it forbidding interventions, shows how paradoxically unsuitable Listing can be, and why preservation loses so many potential sympathizers, who are baffled that an edict which seeks to restrict local options on spatial changes and which comes with no assistance or resources to make necessary improvements. 

The shabby, revolting Preston Bus Station could be an opportunity reinvigorate this megastructure into the glorious Temple to Transport that shines not only from rows of glossy Google jpegs, but at the centerpiece of a beautiful section of a revitalized city. This would prove the naysayers wrong by bringing forth the merits of the building, which if it is indeed a successful work of architecture, should be widely accessible to the general public. Instead, the only message seems to be a baffling and condescending dispatch from the capital: we know better than you.

All photos except 2nd & 3rd ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

Shardenfreude

An icon for an Architecture for Humanity Valentine's Day charity auction, 2012. 

 Around 40 architectural landmarks are arranged to make a heart. 

If the Shard is among them, it is the small, dark pylon at the bottom, underneath

 the Tower Bridge, to the left of Nelson's column. The London Eye, the Gherkin, 

Natwest Tower and even the Carbuncle Cup-winning Strata are more prominent. 

Liebt niemand die Shard? 

It was actually not difficult to find favorable words for London's newest, tallest tower in the press leading up to last week's opening, but most of the platitudes emanate from the building's builders, backers, and its architect. 

The opening ceremony, in which the Shard had frickin' laser beams coming out of its head, was actually a quite fitting metaphor for the building: somewhat cheesy, ostentatious, unoriginal, self-important, and unable to be avoided even far across London.

The Shard's baptism by beacons occurred in the same week as the "LIE-BOR" scandal oozed out of London and around the world, and the building's constant honorific--the tallest building in Europe-- is spoken in a period when the very word "Europe" is a source of anxiety in a way unimaginable a decade ago. Similarly, a metropolis that had long-since sold its Georgian squares to Kuwaitis, and its department stores to Egyptians, and allowed the Saudis, Russians, Qataris and others to own and build so much of the city, now see this foreign control as endless and out of control. It is a tower of luxury in a city and country divided by wealth and privilege.

And yet, here it is, London's newest tower, meant to be a towering symbol of London's continued relevance, renewal, and righteousness. Yet a comparison of the completion of the Shard with the arrival of the Gherkin less than a decade ago reveals two completely different receptions. The juxtaposition is an apt one: the Gherkin was the most prominent addition to London's skyline in years, and furthermore is just more glass-enclosed office space for foreign financial firms, like the Shard. Yet the very different regard for these two towers is remarkable.

The Gherkin, firstly, did not rise in a controversial area: The Gherkin rose in the existing business district, among a shiny cluster of financial office blocks that had walled off the City since the 1970s. It was not even the tallest spire among these, whereas the Shard looms alone over the streets of Southwark.

Even before it was finished in 2004, the Swiss Re: Headquarters was granted a giggle-inducting name of an edible delight that doubles as an erotic euphemism (although its true that some people don't regard the name as a mark of admiration and it is certainly true that funny nicknames are not given to London skyscrapers purely out of affection). And yet the Shard is not a nickname by the public and press: it is the official name of the building, a central aspect of its polished marketing. And while the Gherkin brings to mind salacious and sundry associations, a Shard of glass comes from the violent cracking of a pane, a shattering: its broken pieces sharp and skin-slicing: a horror-movie weapon, not a silly sexual slang. 

If the appellation is just unimportant, the origin story is not, and the Gherkin is more British than the Shard will ever be. Designed by a British architect, a Lord no less (in a slightly more innocent, pre-MP expenses and pre-phone hacking era which had less disdain for the wealthy and more regard for Parliament). Even its address, St. Mary's Axe, was atavistic and adorable, suggesting both the christian shrines of the pre-modern City and the quirky serendipity of English geography (what other nation names an alley an axe?).

Finally, its swirling strips of climate-controlling rhomboid glass curtain recall the lead-paneled windows of Tudor timber-frames that the district once had, bridging its most futuristic feature with the ancient heritage of the area: the Gherkin managed to be both forward-looking yet quintessentially British (whereas the Shard has been accused of being not just Qatari but North Korean).

In this patriotic fable, the Gherkin embodied the core sentiment of London's fin-de-siecle self-satisfactory myth and self-congratulatory mood that swept over the city: London, ancient, creaking, damp, and increasingly diminutive, had remained atop the rankings of the most important, relevant, modern, and cool cities in the world. Indeed, London, long-past its prime as the capital of empire, had remained the center of the world.

Online Adverts for Iceland Express airlines, c.2009. 

London is shown by Westminster Cathedral, the Tower, Big Ben, St. Paul's,

 and most prominently the London Eye and the Gherkin.

It was that the Gherkin, along with its earlier contemporary, the London Eye, a similarly-circular and equally-visible contemporary, that were the celebrated as symbols of this triumph. Both were cute: a plump priapsism of late-cool Brittania exuberance, with the Eye as its sister iteration, a childlike-carnival ride over the Thames, just opposite Westminster.

The Vivian Westwood Christmas display window at Selfridge's Department Store, 

Oxford Street, London, December 2005. 

The London Eye, The Monument, St. Paul's Cathedral, 

the BT/Post Office Tower, and Charing Cross are all discernible. ©2005 Bauzeitgeist.

Landmarks they became, and symbols they remain. The Gherkin and the Eye took their place among the pantheon of London's architectural idols in print, posters, advertisements, and other media, joining its elders St. Paul, Big Ben, the Monument, and Tower Bridge. The Gherkin popped up across the visual landscape of London in those years, and still does today, in the constant graphic representation of the skyline, and by extension, a city and country enjoying a renaissance of its own ingenuity.

 Above: An advert on a tube escalator, December 2005, showing 

St. Paul's, the Gherkin, and the Tower Bridge. 

Above: Great Southwest Trains billboard at Waterloo Station, February 2006. 

The skyline shows the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, Nelsons' column, 

the Eros fountain, St. Paul's, the Monument, the Gherkin, the London Eye, and Tower Bridge. 

 Above: A commemorative Kitkat bar box, c.2010. 

St. Paul's, One Canada Wharf, and The Gherkin stand for London.

Above: two posters for the 2007 Tour de France in London. 

The Gherkin is the most prominent landmark shown, 

but Lloyds of London makes an appearance.

Quite awkwardly, the Shard has yet to receive such graphic laurels. The supertall was deliberately crafted to be an icon of the city, yet thus far there are hardly any outlines of London's skyline, whether within the UK or elsewhere, that include it.

A mural on 5th Avenue, New York, in January 2012, advertising 

the opening of a Ted Baker clothing emporium. Robot mannequins 
trim a hedgerow into the shapes of London landmarks: 

Lord Nelson, Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, St. Paul's Big Ben, 
Westminster Cathedral, Eros, Tower Bridge, and the Gherkin.

Even the hideously unloved Natwest Tower, the thoughtless trifecta of Canary Wharf, the heinously bizarre city hall helmet, and the long-loathed and utterly defunct BT Tower appear more often (interestingly, the 3-year old Heron Tower, officially the city's tallest but with even less to distinguish itself than the drab Natwest Tower, has not been adopted, either).But it is constantly the Gherkin and the Eye that are purposefully included to indicate the contemporary city.

Top: U is for Underground @2009 Paul Thurlby 

Above: ©Artist unknown, c.2009 via this tumblr

 Both use the ensemble of St. Paul's 

the Gherkin, and Natwest to represent London.

Compared to the much less frequent examples incorporating the Shard:

Above: Moxiecreative sells Glenn Michaels's "Touristique" city series which shows, unusually, 

Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium, alongside

The Gherkin, the London Eye, Big Ben and Tower Bridge. The Shard is also prominent.

Above: The Londonist, a widely-read events blog, is one of the first and few to incorporate the Shard 

into its logo, alongside Big Ben, the Eye, the Gherkin and St. Paul's dome.

The lack of acceptance of the Shard is especially remarkable in the year 2012, when London and the rest of Britain, were are told, will be renewed via the magic of the Olympics. The Shard already has an awkward relationship to this spectacle, in that it actually has nothing to do with the Olympics at all, but is being finished in the same year and that the Olympic games will occur in the same city. Last week's laser-show opening was a kickoff of the Olympics, just weeks away, but one that didn't make reference to the games at all.

 The Reporting from London, 2011. 

Top: Al Jazeera shows the Gherkin and the Tower Bridge. 

Above: SkyNews from the London Stock Exchange, showing St. Paul's, 

Tower 42, the Gherkin, and the towers of Canary Wharf.

The games have ratcheted up the provision of graphic representations of the city, even among those media groups which do not have official Olympic broadcasting, such as CNN and the BBC, but also by NBC Universal:

Above: CNNGo! celebrates London, 2012.The skyline is clearly made up of the London Eye, 

Westminster Cathedral and Big Ben, and the Tower Bridge, 

with the Gherkin and what may be the helmut-shaped city Hall on the underside.
Below: NBC's promotional trailer for the Summer Olympics. 
The opening sequence shows Big Ben, the London Eye, Buckingham Palace and the Gherkin, but not the Shard.  

All of these 2012-specific spots pay respects to the Gherkin and the Eye, along with the classic tourist landmarks such as Big Ben, Tower Bridge and St. Paul's, but none of them show the Shard, not even the BBC's non-Olympic Olympic extravaganza: "London Calling, The City of 2012" whose title animation shows One Canada Wharf and even the forever-loathed Centre Pointe, but does not include this year's debut tower:

The uplifting television advert, with panoramas of the Thames and long shots of a dozen London landmarks, especially St. Paul's and the London eye, shows the Shard only for a split-second in the background of a night vista:

Surely the Shard will be more widely depicted over time, when its presence is more in harmony with the mood of its city. Its not like its going anywhere, and in the future its initial associations will wear away. But it is this lack of inclusion thus far, the lack of celebration around its arrival, reveals that it is so disdained as to make its artistic ambassadors act as if it wasn't there.

Big brash buildings often take time fit in, especially in older, historic cities which fret over threats to the appearance of its ancient cityscape. But the faint praise for Piano's feat is due to more than just an uneasy reaction to this enormous erection's sun- and landmark-view blocking height or mass. Skyscrapers are landmarks, and landmarks are symbols, which by definition stand for something, and the creator cannot always declare the definitions. For an architectural gesture that was always designed to be an icon, it is the very fact that it is a symbol, and what it is a symbol of, that has made the Shard so unwelcome. 

The Guardian of Guangzhou

Where the GOH is now. ©2011 Google.

THE BANKS OF THE PEARL RIVER, GUANGZHOU.

Peter Kelly's curious diatribe in Blueprint late last year is a weakly-argued disgruntlement by a professional print journalist toward bloggers, blaming them for their lack of formal criticism of new architecture, as most chose instead explore niche topics or personal interests.

In response, many so-besieged bloggers have aligned themselves with a general dissatisfaction of the state of current architectural criticism, in which many print critics seem wedded to the public relations arms of celebrity architectural offices, real estate developers, and government, and are accused of being either adolescently star-struck, or agents in a larger power brokerage, of which the newspaper as a whole is part.

With this debate on-going, it is all the more remarkable to have Jonathan Glancey of the Manchester Guardian file simultaneous print and video reviews of a large project by a major architect: global hyperstar Zaha Hadid and her recently-opened Guangzhou Opera House in Southern China. These twin adorations, with the print piece embarrassingly headlined, "Move over Sydney!" perfectly exhibit the pathetic state of architectural journalism, which has so engendered starchitect hagiography in general and the Zaha-worship in particular.

Both the video and article don't offer anything remotely technical, other than reporting that the acoustic designer helpfully declares his own work to be "perfect." Even for a popular, non-professional audience, the absence of any level of specific performative analysis is astonishing. Its as if music were reviewed while avoiding all mention of the instrument's harmonies or the singer's pitch, or if a film was reviewed while excluding analysis of the camera work or editing.

Its one of the most remarkable buildings not just in China, but in the whole world!

Jonathan Glancey says virtually nothing specific or meaningful about the architectural design, and says a lot that makes little sense, be it either helplessly vague or annoyingly cliched. Glancey's verbage is a parade of contemporary architectural bromides, kicking off the video with the hugely-dated metaphor that a particularly unusual architectural form was built by an alien civilization. Elsewhere he compares the building to a bolt of lightning. He variously characterizes the "geometry" as either impossible and gravity-defying.

Where on Earth or in space is this otherworldly monument?!

Most ignominiously, Glancey repeats, almost word for word, the architectural office's own PR metaphor for the structure: a typically empty comparison of the opera house to a natural phenomenon:

From Simon Yu of the ZHA project team: "“We liked erosion and stones. It worked well next to the Pearl River. The metaphor is two pebbles picked from the bed of the river and placed on the river bank.”

From the ZHA press release (via Dezeen): Shaped to resemble two pebbles on the bank of the Pearl River, the building houses a 1,800-seat theatre plus 400-seat multifunctional hall, rehearsal rooms and entrance hall...Like pebbles in a stream smoothed by erosion, the Guangzhou Opera House sits in perfect harmony with its riverside location.

From the Guardian: Set in Haixinsha Square, a brand new stretch of south China's ever-expanding trading city, the opera house takes the form of what appear to be two enormous pebbles that might have been washed up on the shores of the Pearl river, on which Guangzhou stands. Rough-shaped things sheathed in triangles of granite and glass protrusions, one houses the main auditorium while the smaller encloses a multipurpose performance space.

From the Video: "...Rest like Giant pebbles on shore of pearl river. They act as the cultural anchor of massive development of new financial towers..."

In one of the most revealing moments of the video, Glancey, standing head-on to the camera on an upper level balcony high above the "gravity-defying foyers", seems to apologize for the roaring din of the intermission crowd mingling below ("Its very loud…but its supposed to be…its an opera house," he says in a high, contrite tone), as if his slight frame could censor whatever auditory flaw he perceives to need masking.

Sometimes, just sometimes, architecture makes you want to burst out into song! ...the building behind me does all the singing you'll ever want!

The view behind him, through a massive, irregular space, is an extremely intriguing one, and the noise could be either a purposefully or unintentionally enjoyable experience, but Glancey neither asks Zaha (or the acoustics consultant) about this effect, nor gets out of the way to let the camera lean over the balcony for his audience. In this way, not only is it not clear what there is in the building to dislike, there isn't even a very good expression of what may, at least within the realm of possibility, be some effective or enjoyable aspects of the architecture.

Very nice? Its a bit more than that! Its a truly radical design!

This can't even be called criticism. There is no portion of the reporting that lets up even momentarily on the blood-rushing, exhilarating promotion of the subjects at hand. There is no point where he criticizes the building.

The building, even when empty, has this quality of being restlessly alive.!

Image courtesy of the Guardian by Dan Chung

With its speedy editing and great number of dark night shots, it is difficult to get a visual sense of the form of the interior or exterior of the opera house in the four minute video, its pop-synth soundtrack not withstanding. Redeemably, the Guardian's 20-image slideshow provides a much more thorough visual understanding of the space, but Glancey's own works remain confusing. But providing an understanding of the architecture is not the point. Even more than the building itself, the purpose is to promote the personality behind it.

Even Zaha seems dazzled by the result!!

Tellingly, there is as much face time on the clip as there are shots of the new construction, whether inside or outside. In four minutes of video, the viewer has more time to examine Glancey's teeth and Zaha's leathery complexion than gain a spatial understanding of the building.

A virtuoso performance!!

Glancey's breathless, hyperbolic intoxication isn't just hilariously over-enthusiastic, but is actually detrimental in several ways. Glancey is obviously drunk on both celebrity-workship and signature form-making. Aside from his floor-licking veneration of Zaha and her opera house, one of Glancey's main points is that the citizens and leaders of Cardiff, and Britain by extension, are pathetically timorous and myopic to have not done whatever it took to get a Zaha building. As if a Zaha Opera House=Zaha Opera House (even the Lauraete herself had to chide Glancey mildly for this view), and more broadly ignoring whatever political or fiscal context the Cardiff Opera House project had to navigate to work. Glancey exhibits no concern for this.

Guangzhou's gain is Cardiff's loss. Zaha Hadid is a trailblazer! But the trail she blazes so very brightly has still to light up British towns and cities... Zaha had hoped to built an opera house like this years ago in Cardiff Bay in Wales, but an unholy chorus of dim local politics and cultural philistinism wrecked her plans.

While Glancey mentions how the Opera House anchors a new district of this enormous city, there is almost no visual or verbal exploration of this. More specifically, the social, political, and economic milieux in which this Opera House was solicited and realized is almost entirely ignored. Glancey flatly states: "this extraordinary building has been a very big event in China," as vague and meaningless as any of his other declarations.

Although its appeal will be global...it is built very much for local conditions.

In fact, it is left to a completely non-architectural journal to cover these issues at all: it is only by happening to read a column in the Financial Times--but not by its architecture critic Edwin Heathcote, but its South China correspondent, Rahul Jacob-- that the larger context of still-impoverished China, with Guangzhou its Dickensian factory-opolis, is incorporated into a discussion of the building:

This conundrum – of an opera house that cost more than $200m to build but has the concert schedule of an institution flailing financially – might seem baffling at first but it is emblematic of the problems facing China. It has a government that is eager to spend lavishly on trophy projects such as high-speed railways and concert halls but not always the will to manage the minutiae of ensuring that ticket prices are affordable or that programming is adequate.

The GOH is the most extreme example. “You have the GOH with no [resident] symphony and no opera chorus,” says one observer. “Beijing and the local government pitched in to build the opera house but when it comes to programming the attitude is ‘You mean we have to pay for that too?’”

Instead, Glancey closes with a bang:

Is this a great building? Well, yes I think it is...A marriage of high, intellectual, brilliant avant-garde architecture and true populism...what a wonderful meeting that is. A grand, avant-garde architecture opera house for everyone.

Not so much avant-garde as Avant-Guardian. At least he didn't blog about it.

A tweet from Dwell Magazine, linking to Glancey's video in the Guardian.