Organic crackers

Faced with the prospect of Berlusconi becoming president of all he purveys, I suppose I ought to be feeling more generous towards the idea of a non-elected royal family. They aren't all bad, after all, unless useless is necessarily a component of bad, and the Windsors, as my mother always reminds me, work very hard (although the index against which their workload is measured isn't that clear - work hard compared to what? A junior doctor? A rickshaw driver? A crack whore?). Even the House of Lords is beginning to look like a valuable corrective to an elected house of mediocrities with their fingers in the till. But Prince Charles's latest foray into throwing his weight around has really got my goat. He's used his royal connections to pull the plug on a new development designed by Richard Rodgers for an area opposite the home of the Chelsea pensioners in London. The area's owned by the Qatar royal family, which has bowed to pressure from Charlie, presumably under the impression that his opinion has some weight beyond the tea rooms of middle England, the ones that serve Duchy Original muffins. As long as he's selling biscuits, the man's just about bearable, and the shortbread really is rather good. But his views on organic farming are widely regarded as crackpot Little Englandism in a world in which the majority of people now live in cities, etc. His woolly ecumenicalism is irritating tosh, but that's matter for another post. And he's bad at architecture as well. Prince Charles' notion of what constitutes an attractive building is, bluntly, philistine. He's had it in for Richard Rogers since the National Gallery fiasco, where he muscled in to stop London acquiring an interesting new building and had it replaced by something that looks like the warehouse bit of a provincial Sainsbury's. Now he's used his royal clout to block a development that would have provided work for over 10,000 people and over two hundred affordable homes in an area of London that doesn't exactly sing affordability. You can see what Rodgers has to say about this here. The point, as Rodgers says, is not whether his plans are good or not. The point is that procedures already exist for blocking a building that shouldn't be built, and that these weren't followed. What happened was that a non-elected architectural luddite muscled in and made a couple of phone calls to a non-elected dictator who owns a large slab of central London. This shouldn't happen. I hope that Rodgers can get his show back on the road, though it's unlikely. In the meantime, Prince Charles should get back to doing what he - or his employees are - good at: baking a genteelly mean organic cracker.

Colour chart, Colchester

The minute and the immense

There's an expression for someone who has to travel a long way to discover something he could have found more easily on his doorstep. Whatever that expression is, it could certainly be applied to me as far as the work of the architect Paolo Soleri is concerned. Born and trained in Turin, where I once lived, it took a trip to Phoenix for me to come across the man's work. The title to this post comes from his book Arcosanti: an urban laboratory? - a collection of thoughts and their applicability to his experimental town in the Arizona desert: Arcosanti. I only got to see the town from a distance, but we visited his workshop, where I photographed this chime.

This post isn't finished, merely interrupted. By dinner.

Dinner over. In this book Soleri comments:

The value, indeed the imperative of crowding, is documented by 3.5 eons of life. Organisms are by definition crowded, self-contained miniaturized realities. Organisms, societies, and cultures that turn away from such an imperative would be strange, paradoxical and ineffective exceptions. One such exception is the sprawl resulting from the age of the automobile [...] Sprawl is a pathological event. It suffers from gigantism with all the derivative handicaps and shortcomings: environmental disruption, waste, pollution, energy and time depletion, expensive logistics, segregation, and urban decay.

What's interesting is that Soleri should have chosen to build his experimental crowded city within spitting distance of Phoenix, a city that extends in what feels like an almost infinite grid across the skin of the desert. It's too ordered to be considered sprawl, but the overall effect, amplified by the general absence of high-rise building, is of a vast city clinging by its fingernails to the land beneath it, as though the land were about to tilt and throw it off. It's a city of space and distance, and is certainly unmanageable without a car. But do people spend more time travelling in Phoenix than they do in other large cities, where the work place and the home are separated for a host of socio-economic reasons? And would the traffic-free crowded urban environment of Arcosanti leave room for those people who don't - or don't want to - fit? Sometimes segregation is less imposition than a sort of freedom.

Travelling

Coming back to London after Christmas, Jane and I were forced by engineering works on the lines to change at Birmingham. Not just trains, but stations. We had to cross the centre of Birmingham on foot, from New Street to Moor Street. And what an odd place the centre of Birmingham has become, part Blade Runner, part amusement park, part architectural folly, not at all unpleasant, but utterly deracinated, as seems to be the fashion in post-Gehry city centres. Moor Street station, on the other hand, was a rooted joy, and it didn't even feel that refurbished. It felt as though people had simply kept it clean and in working order for all these years. Even the train to London, which took only fifteen minutes longer than the usual Virgin connection, came from an epoch when trains were designed to provide their passengers with decent window space and relatively roomy seats. Unlike the various Pendolinos employed by Virgin, which look more like bloodied suppositories than anything else and provide half the space of their Italian counterparts.

Sick building

The university language centre, where I work, is on the seventh floor of one of Rome's ugliest buildings, halfway between the Pyramid and St Paul outside the Walls. Thrown up in the 1970s, it manages to seem both shoddy and hulking. It might have been modish at the time, with its matt grey panels and brutal silhouette, but time has done it no favours. It houses, among other things, Rome's traffic police, where people pay their fines, and the local tax offices. Not surprisingly, it's an unloved place. Which may explain why we all had to leave the building at 5 pm on Monday, following an anonymous call to say that someone had left a bomb. We stood outside for a while, then headed home.

Recreational drugs

This is painted on the outside wall of the basement of the building in which I work.The care with which the mushroom has been rendered, in all its - how shall I say this? - hallucinatory splendour is in stark contrast to the building itself, which seems to be held together by rusty wire, polystyrene and asbestos. All nine floors of it. I have photographs and I'll be posting them tomorrow. Prepare yourself.

Hausmann rules, but not always

One of the joys of Paris - of central Paris, at least - is the endless variation on the theme of Hausmann; street after street, quartier after quartier, of houses that follow the same essential rules of architecture, yet each with its je ne sais quoi, a colour, a detail, a proportion of window, almost identical yet not quite; harmony without regimentation, simply because it's better that way. It makes sense.

And then you turn a corner and see two little buildings like this, squeezed into a wedge of space that's good for nothing else, idiosyncratic, unplanned, but still with the single line of guttering to unite them, and the garret window, and the green of the smaller façade tuned into the probably mildewed roof tiles of its slightly more prosperous neighbour, although both of them have almost certainly seen better days.