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Not building: the lure of desolation.
First published in Prophecy magazine #8, New York, November 2005.
Living in a city of ever-present ghosts, as London is - a city scarred by past and present violence but also blessed with almost mystical regenerative powers - is to acknowledge the power of what some might see as imperfection. It is not imperfection. It is part of the endless transition that any living city must undergo. And it is why I have come to treasure the most potent and necessary part of any urban process: dereliction, desolation.
Like an ending love affair or the maturing of a loved child, dereliction contains a sense of both loss and hope. What has happened - known, and perhaps lamented - is offset by what is to happen, which might be worse but which might just possibly be good. This frozen moment between two states of activity is, for me, supremely poignant. Because - anywhere that land has a value - it will not be allowed to remain in this state. It is inevitable, even desirable, that a new use should be found for it, whether it is an abandoned brownstone, a derelict railhead where the birches shoulder through the ballast, or a wharfside where ships no longer dock and the weeds sprout among the cranes. Except in extreme cases, these are assets with investment potential or civic value. So be it - but I wish it were not always so.
I'll confess right away that my liking for dereliction is supremely selfish. It is built upon the idea of the lost world - not some jungle paradise, but a misplaced piece of the urban realm. To enjoy an abandoned fragment of cityscape is to want to be in it alone, or with just a friend or two to share the experience. It does not work so well in a run-down ghetto, which by its very nature is populous - though there is plenty that is evocative in such places, as you find in the now impoverished former commercial district and Art Deco cinema quarter of Los Angeles, for instance. No, what I am talking about are the true urban deserts, the uninhabited places. The feeling that there are teeming millions around you, not far away - but not here, not in this place. I should like to know more about the rustbelt zones along the railtrack between Philadelphia and New Jersey. I always like the look of the emptier, post-industrial bits of Queen's. I have heard of the old fishing creeks near Kennedy Airport. It is precisely that sharp contrast of activities, effectively encountering a time-shift, that appeals.
As a teenager I would cadge rides to sundry obscure and unpromising industrial locations on the edges of London or Birmingham. Map in hand, I would search until I found the hump-backed bridge, the padlocked gate, the barbed wire that announced the city's canal system. In those days England's late 18th and early 19th century network of rural canals was already well on the way to rediscovery by the seekers of alternative holidays, but it was a different story altogether in the cities. The waters were all but undisturbed by boats. Freight traffic had largely ceased, holidaymakers seldom ventured there. You might find the odd optimistic fisherman, but that was it. On one particular spring day I walked right across London on canal towpaths from west to east, and encountered a total of around five people.
That would be an impossibility now. England's urban canals too have been rediscovered - as pedestrian and cycle ways, as development opportunities. There has been a total mood-shift. People used to want to fill in the canals and build over them. Today they have discovered that the presence of water adds value, so the rush is on to build waterside properties. Old long-vanished canals are being dug out. New canals are being built - all not so much in the service of boating, but to boost the profits of developers. Take my route across London or Birmingham now and you walk along tastefully signposted routes between one swanky apartment complex and the next. You can still get that elegiac feeling in full measure if you go to Glasgow and find the abandoned series of canal basins at Port Dundas, brimful of sparkling clear water - but not for long. The basins are being reconnected to the restored trans-Scotland Forth and Clyde canal. The development opportunity has been scented. Hectares of apartments and offices are planned. Now I have to go to New York State, and hunt down the fugitive remains of the long-defunct Delaware and Hudson canal, to get my fix of unexploited aqueous industrial archaeology.
For me the lure of dereliction has something in common with the ancient pastime of beachcombing. As the tide withdraws, it leaves behind perhaps some interesting detritus to kick through and wonder at. The last thing you want is a squad of other people all doing the same thing alongside you. And this is why my heart sank when I heard that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had walked along Manhattan's High Line in order to announce $18m of Federal funds to start turning this abandoned elevated freight railroad on the far West Side into a 20-block linear park. My heart bleeds by proxy, for I have never seen the High Line except in photographs. Yet I know what will happen. It does not matter how good are the designs by landscape architects Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio and Renfro: when it becomes a public park, it will cease to be a magical lost domain, and that is the end of it. Manhattan will have gained a valuable pedestrian resource, but lost a secret. It's the old problem with such places: mere abandonment is not a viable long-term option. For the High Line, it was this or demolition. An alternative - steady-state, things being left exactly as they were, for the enjoyment only of the initiated - was not considered. Given its location, I'm not surprised.
I am on my guard against nostalgia here. Pointless to wish Manhattan back into the state it was in when boho types could pick up ex-industrial lofts for nothing and live outrageously fulfilled, if drug-fuelled, lives. We all wish we had spotted the opportunity and made some clever property investment years ago. You had the meat-packing district: we had London's Clerkenwell, previously a haunt of watchmakers, jewellers and printers, now bestridden by architects, designers and, inevitably, chic urban loft-dwellers. This is how it goes. Cities regenerate themselves from their own scar tissue. It might seem perverse to appreciate the scarring, but perhaps that is just because it has the sweet attraction of the transitory. There is no time to tire of evocative desolation: before you know it, it's gone.
The whole point about commercial redevelopment, from the point of view of those doing it, is to remove all traces of the past. Those traces may be rich and evocative, but to the developer they are like unwelcome germs. Sanitisation must occur. A clean break, a new start, must be made. Property developers are industrial-strength bleach. They kill all known character. Even that is better than keeping a few mute remnants, like the stranded pit-head winding wheels you find standing around the country parks made on the sites of former collieries. To a lover of dereliction, those are merely insulting to the ghosts of those who once worked the mines. Better the stupid, tabula rasa redevelopment, the call of Mammon or the palace of culture conceived as a regeneration device.
So an abandoned railway station in Paris, beloved of art-film makers, became the ponderous Musee d'Orsay. Another set of excellent rusting railway sidings became the French National Library, and exactly the same thing happened in exactly the same sort of place in London with the British Library. An old power station became London's Tate Modern art museum while retaining nothing of the feel of what it had been (the converted factory of Dia:Beacon up the Hudson Valley is considerably better in this vein). In London's West India docks, land which had had a negative value in the 1970s as the ships moved downstream became a goldmine. Where you could once find roaming horses and strange communities living in leaking boats, they built Canary Wharf, our version of Battery Park City. I can't begin to pretend that the horses and the boat communities could have stayed there for ever: better, perhaps, that they did not. The memory of encountering them is real enough, even today. They had unconsciously made dereliction into something approaching performance art: a piece made just for me, on that particular day.
Shortly before he died, I found myself at a dinner next to the great architectural thinker and maverick Cedric Price. Price saw round the edges of things: he was impatient with the received wisdom that it is always best to build, rather than to find some alternative strategy. His whole life as an architect was spent mostly avoiding building, with some rare exceptions such as London Zoo's main aviary. Even his one-time assistants, such as the now internationally celebrated architect Will Alsop, never quite knew what it was that he did all day. I had seldom found myself on Price's wavelength, except once, around 1979, when a huge press conference was being held to announce the formation of a development authority for London's docklands. The building plans were unveiled: questions were invited. Price stood up and asked, in all seriousness: "Why don't you just leave it exactly as it is?" Nobody could find an answer to that. He was asking for the impossible.
In 2003, sat next to Price, I remembered this and tentatively advanced the idea of some kind of celebration or analysis of the idea of fruitful dereliction. Dereliction for its own sake. The ailing Price, struggling even to speak, was right there, instantly. This was, after all, only another take on his constant ideas of short-life, adaptable structures, of indeterminacy in the face of an unknown future. He pondered the idea of dereliction. "Don't build all over it," he said. "Keep it." A long pause, a sideways smile, and the typically gnomic utterance. "You never know - it might come in useful one day. We just don't know what for yet."
Not building: the lure of desolation.
First published in Prophecy magazine #8, New York, November 2005.
Living in a city of ever-present ghosts, as London is - a city scarred by past and present violence but also blessed with almost mystical regenerative powers - is to acknowledge the power of what some might see as imperfection. It is not imperfection. It is part of the endless transition that any living city must undergo. And it is why I have come to treasure the most potent and necessary part of any urban process: dereliction, desolation.
Like an ending love affair or the maturing of a loved child, dereliction contains a sense of both loss and hope. What has happened - known, and perhaps lamented - is offset by what is to happen, which might be worse but which might just possibly be good. This frozen moment between two states of activity is, for me, supremely poignant. Because - anywhere that land has a value - it will not be allowed to remain in this state. It is inevitable, even desirable, that a new use should be found for it, whether it is an abandoned brownstone, a derelict railhead where the birches shoulder through the ballast, or a wharfside where ships no longer dock and the weeds sprout among the cranes. Except in extreme cases, these are assets with investment potential or civic value. So be it - but I wish it were not always so.
I'll confess right away that my liking for dereliction is supremely selfish. It is built upon the idea of the lost world - not some jungle paradise, but a misplaced piece of the urban realm. To enjoy an abandoned fragment of cityscape is to want to be in it alone, or with just a friend or two to share the experience. It does not work so well in a run-down ghetto, which by its very nature is populous - though there is plenty that is evocative in such places, as you find in the now impoverished former commercial district and Art Deco cinema quarter of Los Angeles, for instance. No, what I am talking about are the true urban deserts, the uninhabited places. The feeling that there are teeming millions around you, not far away - but not here, not in this place. I should like to know more about the rustbelt zones along the railtrack between Philadelphia and New Jersey. I always like the look of the emptier, post-industrial bits of Queen's. I have heard of the old fishing creeks near Kennedy Airport. It is precisely that sharp contrast of activities, effectively encountering a time-shift, that appeals.
As a teenager I would cadge rides to sundry obscure and unpromising industrial locations on the edges of London or Birmingham. Map in hand, I would search until I found the hump-backed bridge, the padlocked gate, the barbed wire that announced the city's canal system. In those days England's late 18th and early 19th century network of rural canals was already well on the way to rediscovery by the seekers of alternative holidays, but it was a different story altogether in the cities. The waters were all but undisturbed by boats. Freight traffic had largely ceased, holidaymakers seldom ventured there. You might find the odd optimistic fisherman, but that was it. On one particular spring day I walked right across London on canal towpaths from west to east, and encountered a total of around five people.
That would be an impossibility now. England's urban canals too have been rediscovered - as pedestrian and cycle ways, as development opportunities. There has been a total mood-shift. People used to want to fill in the canals and build over them. Today they have discovered that the presence of water adds value, so the rush is on to build waterside properties. Old long-vanished canals are being dug out. New canals are being built - all not so much in the service of boating, but to boost the profits of developers. Take my route across London or Birmingham now and you walk along tastefully signposted routes between one swanky apartment complex and the next. You can still get that elegiac feeling in full measure if you go to Glasgow and find the abandoned series of canal basins at Port Dundas, brimful of sparkling clear water - but not for long. The basins are being reconnected to the restored trans-Scotland Forth and Clyde canal. The development opportunity has been scented. Hectares of apartments and offices are planned. Now I have to go to New York State, and hunt down the fugitive remains of the long-defunct Delaware and Hudson canal, to get my fix of unexploited aqueous industrial archaeology.
For me the lure of dereliction has something in common with the ancient pastime of beachcombing. As the tide withdraws, it leaves behind perhaps some interesting detritus to kick through and wonder at. The last thing you want is a squad of other people all doing the same thing alongside you. And this is why my heart sank when I heard that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had walked along Manhattan's High Line in order to announce $18m of Federal funds to start turning this abandoned elevated freight railroad on the far West Side into a 20-block linear park. My heart bleeds by proxy, for I have never seen the High Line except in photographs. Yet I know what will happen. It does not matter how good are the designs by landscape architects Field Operations and architects Diller Scofidio and Renfro: when it becomes a public park, it will cease to be a magical lost domain, and that is the end of it. Manhattan will have gained a valuable pedestrian resource, but lost a secret. It's the old problem with such places: mere abandonment is not a viable long-term option. For the High Line, it was this or demolition. An alternative - steady-state, things being left exactly as they were, for the enjoyment only of the initiated - was not considered. Given its location, I'm not surprised.
I am on my guard against nostalgia here. Pointless to wish Manhattan back into the state it was in when boho types could pick up ex-industrial lofts for nothing and live outrageously fulfilled, if drug-fuelled, lives. We all wish we had spotted the opportunity and made some clever property investment years ago. You had the meat-packing district: we had London's Clerkenwell, previously a haunt of watchmakers, jewellers and printers, now bestridden by architects, designers and, inevitably, chic urban loft-dwellers. This is how it goes. Cities regenerate themselves from their own scar tissue. It might seem perverse to appreciate the scarring, but perhaps that is just because it has the sweet attraction of the transitory. There is no time to tire of evocative desolation: before you know it, it's gone.
The whole point about commercial redevelopment, from the point of view of those doing it, is to remove all traces of the past. Those traces may be rich and evocative, but to the developer they are like unwelcome germs. Sanitisation must occur. A clean break, a new start, must be made. Property developers are industrial-strength bleach. They kill all known character. Even that is better than keeping a few mute remnants, like the stranded pit-head winding wheels you find standing around the country parks made on the sites of former collieries. To a lover of dereliction, those are merely insulting to the ghosts of those who once worked the mines. Better the stupid, tabula rasa redevelopment, the call of Mammon or the palace of culture conceived as a regeneration device.
So an abandoned railway station in Paris, beloved of art-film makers, became the ponderous Musee d'Orsay. Another set of excellent rusting railway sidings became the French National Library, and exactly the same thing happened in exactly the same sort of place in London with the British Library. An old power station became London's Tate Modern art museum while retaining nothing of the feel of what it had been (the converted factory of Dia:Beacon up the Hudson Valley is considerably better in this vein). In London's West India docks, land which had had a negative value in the 1970s as the ships moved downstream became a goldmine. Where you could once find roaming horses and strange communities living in leaking boats, they built Canary Wharf, our version of Battery Park City. I can't begin to pretend that the horses and the boat communities could have stayed there for ever: better, perhaps, that they did not. The memory of encountering them is real enough, even today. They had unconsciously made dereliction into something approaching performance art: a piece made just for me, on that particular day.
Shortly before he died, I found myself at a dinner next to the great architectural thinker and maverick Cedric Price. Price saw round the edges of things: he was impatient with the received wisdom that it is always best to build, rather than to find some alternative strategy. His whole life as an architect was spent mostly avoiding building, with some rare exceptions such as London Zoo's main aviary. Even his one-time assistants, such as the now internationally celebrated architect Will Alsop, never quite knew what it was that he did all day. I had seldom found myself on Price's wavelength, except once, around 1979, when a huge press conference was being held to announce the formation of a development authority for London's docklands. The building plans were unveiled: questions were invited. Price stood up and asked, in all seriousness: "Why don't you just leave it exactly as it is?" Nobody could find an answer to that. He was asking for the impossible.
In 2003, sat next to Price, I remembered this and tentatively advanced the idea of some kind of celebration or analysis of the idea of fruitful dereliction. Dereliction for its own sake. The ailing Price, struggling even to speak, was right there, instantly. This was, after all, only another take on his constant ideas of short-life, adaptable structures, of indeterminacy in the face of an unknown future. He pondered the idea of dereliction. "Don't build all over it," he said. "Keep it." A long pause, a sideways smile, and the typically gnomic utterance. "You never know - it might come in useful one day. We just don't know what for yet."