Category: Architecture and design

The TfL graffiti challenge

On By Laura MorganIn London, Public transport

TfL is running a poster campaign as part of its Art on the Underground initiative. It consists of a series of quotes which, according to the website, “provoke thought on life in the city”.

One of these is a quote from Gandhi, which I’ve seen proudly displayed at various points along my commute to work. It reads

“THERE IS MORE TO LIFE THAN INCREASING ITS SPEED”

As I spilled off my overcrowded Jubilee Line train after waiting an unfathomably long time at London Bridge, and squeezed my way on to the Central Line only to spend five minutes sitting in a tunnel, it occured to me that the expression of this particular sentiment is rather brazen on TfL’s part. I am very well-behaved and couldn’t possibly consider breaking the law myself, but I hereby offer £20 cash money to the first person to send me photographic evidence that they have found one of these posters and added the line

“ON THE OTHER HAND, IT WOULDN’T BE A BAD PLACE TO START”

Lilies

On By Laura MorganIn Flowers, London1 Comment

I can perceive intellectually that lilies are attractive; I just can’t bring myself to believe it in my heart. The problem is one of association. Just as meeting a lovely Nigel can convince you that it’s a nice name when it plainly isn’t, lilies’ ability to give me an instantaneous, powerful and lasting headache prevents me from appreciating their aesthetic charms.

That this is a minority opinion is borne out by the two – two! – women who separately got on to my train this evening carrying large bunches of lilies. The first landed at the other end of the carriage, but the second came and sat next to me. The journey only takes ten minutes,  but I knew that was long enough, so I got up and perched myself close to the door, breathing fresh air for as long as I possibly could before it slid shut.

I felt a bit bad for the woman. I wanted to explain, but my bad feeling for the woman was trumped by my wish not to have people thinking I was a madwoman on a crowded commuter train.

Fortunately, as I was leaving the train I caught a potent whiff of essence of male armpit, which put all thoughts of lilies – which put, in fact, all thoughts – immediately out of my mind.

Erratum

On By Laura MorganIn Architecture and design, London, Other cities

When I said

Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.

What I really meant was

Not including London, Paris does human-scale street life…etc etc.

London is bigger, so there are more places where it doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s as good as anywhere else’s. I was reminded of this yesterday coming through Brixton Market, which is still the most interesting place I know in London.

Paris

On By Laura MorganIn Architecture and design, Buildings, Other cities

…was still lovely, of course. We caught the sun on the first day and I realised I hadn’t been there in good weather since 1998. It makes walking with no particular purpose in mind much more appealing.

In my second, or maybe third, year at university, I wrote an essay about Haussman’s Paris, and the period between 1853 and 1870 when he, along with Napoleon III,  was responsible for what amounted to a wholescale razing and rebuilding of large swathes of the city. Huge numbers of slum-dwellers were effectively banished; their homes replaced by shiny new apartment buildings which only the rich could afford to live in. This is still the main reason why Paris’s inner city, in the sense in which we use the term, is largely outside the city.

Anyway, one of the things Haussman succeeded in putting in place was a set of rules governing future development in the city, which meant that subsequent building projects have had to abide by the aesthetic rules devised during his period as Prefect of the Seine. As a result, one of the most immediately Parisian of images is the wide, tree-lined boulevard edged with elegant buildings of greyish-white stone, never more than five stories high.  This is the Paris that Haussman defined, and it’s still there much as he envisaged it.

And yet, there’s more variation in Paris than you might think, and it’s the sudden differences as much as the general sameness which make it a beautiful city. Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, but the unexpected sights which lurk around every other corner: a flea market; a gloomy courtyard, usually occupied by a grumpy-looking cat; a carousel; a sudden sharp hill leading up, or down, to a new vista. Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.

And it has La Grande Arche de la Défense, which is really big and has a hole in it:

grande archeMore photos here.

Gay Paree

On By Laura MorganIn Other cities, Reasons to be cheerful

paris

I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.

Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?

Olympics site

On By Laura MorganIn Architecture and design, Buildings, London

I forgot to mention an inadvertent bit of tourism which I did on the way to Norfolk: at Stratford station we spotted what can only have been the 2012 Olympic village.  It’s in the very early stages of being built, but the scale of it is awesome already. If you can find an excuse for going to Stratford, go there sooner rather than later.

Taipei 101 revisited

On By Laura MorganIn Buildings, Other cities1 Comment

There was a programme on BBC2 this evening about Taipei 101, the counterweighted skyscraper I wrote about a few months ago.  If you can endure Richard Hammond (who, separated from the others, is fairly inoffensive, though I prefer the wild-haired one and have no time at all for Clarkson), it’s worth checking out on the iPlayer.  The show focuses on the various feats of engineering which went into the building’s construction, and I was pleased to discover that the story of the building is just as fascinating as the finished product.

It also has the world’s fastest elevator, which travels at the unlikely speed of 1010 metres per minute.  I’ve had my ears pop in Japan’s fastest elevator, in the Yokohama Landmark Tower, but at a piffling 750 metres a minute it barely compares.  (Though looking it up now I discover that it’s also the world’s second-fastest elevator.)

Anyway, I’ve never been to Taiwan, though I’d like to,  so I don’t have any photos of Taipei 101.  Instead, here’s a photo of the view from the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, reflected in a mirror inside the viewing gallery:

landmark

Autumn reading roundup

On By Laura MorganIn Books, Buildings

Interspersed with P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, I have managed to bend my eyes around a few proper books in the last month or two…

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is great fun, my fondness for locally-set stories notwithstanding.   It reminded me a bit of The Wimbledon Poisoner, which is still the only book to have reduced me to helpless, sobbing fits of laughter.  On a crowded train.  I have also bought myself a copy of The Wimbledon Poisoner, which I intend to treat myself to a re-reading of over Christmas.

Jack Maggs is a clever, sideways re-telling of Great Expectations, but I don’t think you’d need to have read the latter book to enjoy it.  Worth it for the atmosphere and the dialogue; Peter Carey catches the Dickensian tone almost perfectly, which makes it all the more jarring on the couple of occasions where he misses it.

The Choking Doberman is all of the things I like best: a meandering, thoughtful discourse on the nature and history of some of the most famous urban legends of our times.  It was published over twenty years ago so there’s been plenty of development since, but the most interesting aspect of it is how many stories which I heard in the 1980s and 1990s were old news even then.  It’s also funny, creepy and disturbing in equal measure, and some of the stories are fantastically gruesome.

Mommie Dearest is Joan Crawford’s daughter Christina’s account of a life lived in the shadow of one of Hollywood’s more genuine fuck-ups.  The stories she tells about her childhood are harrowing, but I came out of it feeling more sorry for Joan, who never overcame her deep unhappiness, than for Christina, who at least managed to find her way out of it and make some sort of normal life for herself.  Worth reading, but steel yourself.

I had been slightly put off The Yiddish Policemen’s Union because for a while it seemed to be one of those books which everyone was reading, and I have a slight and perverse desire not to read those books, or at least not at the same time as everybody else reads them.  I remember mentioning a few years ago to two friends that I was reading We Need to Talk About Kevin, and having them both tell me that they were reading it too.  I felt sullied, and was slightly put off the book.  Anyway, I eventually got around to TYPU and I’m glad I did, because I enjoyed it very much indeed.  I don’t know if it’s because the characters are speaking and thinking in Yiddish (though everything is in English), or if that’s just the way Michael Chabon writes, but the language is so crunchy and substantial that the pleasure one takes in reading it is almost palpable.  It’s exactly as satisfying as making the first footprint in a sheet of deep snow.  It’s also a murder mystery, and I like them lots.

I’m now halfway through a book of short stories by Ethan Coen, which so far I’m also enjoying, and for similar reasons.  But that’s a post for another day.