Here is an interview with architect/theorist/educator/etc Nic Clear concerning ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic. The interview covers a number of topics including the relationship of J. G. Ballard’s work to architecture. On the Ballardian site are included videos made by some of Nic’s students (www.ballardian .com, this is a very good resource for anyone interested in Ballard). We here have replaced the videos with images of some of the more ridiculous projects proposed in Dubai… the oasis of idiocy.

For example this classic:

“A journey. A saga. A legend. The World is today’s great development epic. An engineering odyssey to create an island paradise of sea, sand and sky, a destination has arrived that allows investors to chart their own course and make the world their own”… a vision realized… an ecosystem eliminated

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

While Le Corbusier appears to be (mis)remembered by history for supposedly self-important, grandiose plans to realise an architectural utopia that ignored the basic requirements of its inhabitants, Ballard, according to Manaugh, assumes increasing importance for the manner in which his work acutely analyses the ways in which the built environment can impact psychologically on its users and inhabitants. This includes, he elaborates, an identification of a ‘constant dissatisfaction with … architectural surroundings [that] becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst’. For Manaugh, the ‘psycho spatial’ nature of ‘Ballardian space’ is best articulated by Concrete Island, High-Rise and Super-Cannes, which he has utilised to varying degrees as the cornerstones of several BDLGBLOG posts.

Within the creative arts, the Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord exhibited a series of images that used imagery from Concrete Island and Ballard’s novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976) to examine the legacy of Brutalist architecture in Britain. Lord’s work explicitly critiques the utopian ’social idealism’ of Brutalism, itself a descendant of the Le Corbusier school of architecture, and the fashion in which it disregarded ‘the communal, historic and surrounding built environment’. Yet Lord also successfully captures the sense of ambivalence that powers ‘The Ultimate City’, with its depiction of a far-future, ‘post technological’ world in which the harshness of the urban environment is rejected in favour of a ‘green’, sterile ecotopia, only to be fatally underscored by a lingering lament for the decline of industrial landscapes.

Academically, Ballardian Studies is an emerging discipline in architectural schools. Here, the website of the London-based firm, Azhar Architecture, is instructive, featuring a list entitled ‘What’s being recommended in Architecture Schools: A Sample’. High-Rise, tracking the breakdown of social order in a Corbusian apartment block, is included alongside works from Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Deleuze & Guattari and Guy Debord. At Columbia University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Professor Ursula Heise taught a subject entitled ‘Modern and Postmodern Cities’, in which depictions of ‘the metropolis and urban life’ were considered in 20th-century literature. One session was given over to two Ballard short stories, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and ‘Billennium’ (1962), which rank among the author’s most effective portrayals of the sensory overload of big-city life. Conceptually, the stories are at polar opposites, thematically they are of a piece: the absolute alliance of architecture with late capitalism. ‘Billennium’ is concerned with the complete contraction of public and private space by an overbearing architecture, while ‘Concentration City’ is based on the premise that the city is ever-expanding, without limits, its boundaries unable to be located by the central protagonist, who, no matter how far he travels, ends up where he started.

But the most ambitious academic program to date is almost certainly ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, which was taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2007-08. For Clear and Kennedy, the ’speculative’ nature of Ballardian architectural space is all-important. The course, which utilised film and animation, video and motion-graphic techniques to devise representations of ’synthetic space’, challenged students to examine architectural themes across the broad span of Ballard’s writing. The aim was to process the manner by which he deploys ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ environments to form a coherent analysis of the challenges inherent in a supersaturated technological world. Clear and Kennedy, like Manaugh, also point to the psychological effects of architecture, which leads on to their consideration of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film, London Orbital, as a text not only influenced by Ballard but also by the psychogeographical revival that Sinclair is closely associated with.

I recall in my interview with Manaugh, where I mentioned how I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine…’ You can understand my excitement upon learning of Unit 15! I decided therefore to contact Nic Clear, and pin him down about Ballard, architecture and the fabulous work created by Unit 15, as well as the new U15 program for 2008-09, ‘The Near Future Part II’, which questions whether the utopianism of the ‘corporate architectural complex’ is viable in a world riven by conflict.

Simon Sellars

Rem Koolhaas’  homage to Darth Vader’s house

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenberg’s Crash and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun. We shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. In short, we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered BALLARDIAN.

SIMON SELLARS: Nic, how did the idea for ‘Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future’ come about?

NIC CLEAR: I’ve been interested in Ballard’s writing for many years; I was a big Joy Division fan and read The Atrocity Exhibition simply because they wrote a song with the same name. More recently, it struck me that the themes in Ballard’s work seem to address the issues about the built environment that architectural discourse seems to avoid: namely, how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling, or have fallen apart. Architecture always seems to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails.

SS: How have your students responded to Ballard’s work?

NC: The projects have been very successful, and the use of a literary point of departure has been quite liberating. The Ballardian theme has allowed students to really speculate on what they are doing, but also, more importantly, why they are doing it.

“This is a land that actively encourages business and investment. Here you can experience globally renowned hotels and the richest horse race in the world. And you will find imaginative, breathtaking projects that inspire humanity – such as the Palm Trilogy.”

SS: Besides Unit 15, it seems there are a few architects, architectural critics, architecturally-minded artists and architecture schools that are starting to take notice of Ballard’s work.

NC: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture — maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction — writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist — and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian’. Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Many people may think that Ballard’s characters face the scenarios he creates with an unbelievable stoicism, although Ballard has an advantage over us, as most of us have never had to face any kind of catastrophe. I think the experiences of life in Shanghai during WWII made Jim believe that the human race is able to endure — and inflict — almost any horror imaginable.

The residence of anal satan 

“Parts of the Arabian Gulf have, of course, seen conflict in recent decades. Dubai, together with the other Emirates, has been a haven of peace throughout this time. This has not, however, led to complacency and the security forces are ever vigilant, working to ensure this remains one of the safest places in the world.”

SS: A wider, and resurgent, trend in film and literature, which Ballard seems to have anticipated, is the idea that on some level we secretly desire the apocalypse, that we welcome the chance to explore the farthest limits of alienation. This is something that Chris Nakashima-Brown articulates very well: ‘The persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level … the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.’

NC: Many people may fantasise about these scenarios, but when it comes to losing their own luxuries, people will vote for whoever offers the easiest way out — which most often involves blaming someone else. The most depressing part of how current economic and social structures start falling apart is that, instead of embracing the liberating potential of re-structuring and re-organising, politically things could start getting much more conservative. This is obviously another common theme in Ballard. I grew up in the 70s with the three-day week and the winter of discontent, with the parks of London used as rubbish dumps, but for me it was great power cuts and no school, and out of it came punk … yet the down side was Thatcherism. Obviously the next few years will be catastrophic for ‘big business’ (is that so bad?), and the fall out will be difficult for many, but we will adjust to yet another ‘new normal’. We may even in the long run be better off as a society for it.

Personally, this will be my third major recession, and they are always the most productive times: when no one has money, money stops mattering.

SS: High-Rise is the obvious book to cite when discussing Ballard and architecture. Which of his other works is relevant?

NC: It’s easier to say which one’s aren’t relevant, and the answer to that is probably none! Crash is a personal favourite, I like the perversity of it; it takes the whole modernist fetishisation of technology and mixes it with contemporary obsessions like celebrity cults. The problem with the film was that it was soft-core pornography — all those shots of Debra Unger’s stockings — when really the book is quite hardcore: the leaky orifices, the polysexuality and the car as augmented bodily technology. It’s a surrealist masterpiece up there with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’.

The proposed 1 Km tall Nakheel Tower

“The police force is polite, approachable and highly efficient. Dubai has made global headlines for its tough stance on drugs and makes no apologies for this.”

SS: When I interviewed Geoff Manaugh, he defined ‘Ballardian space’ as ‘psycho spatial’. I’d be interested in your take.

NC: If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city — especially London — then you are pretty close.

SS: Does this relate to Unit 15’s research into ’synthetic space’?

NC: Synthetic space is the merging of the actual and virtual; writers like Ballard and Burroughs have been describing synthetic space for years. Within architectural terms, I see it as the inability to differentiate between spaces and their representations — where spatial representations are increasingly becoming spatial propositions.

SS: Ballard is famously obsessive about multi-storey car parks. What do they mean to him, do you think?

NC: The defining symbol of the 20th century is the motor car, and car parks are part palace and part mausoleum. They also tend to be quite ugly and boring, though often in a strangely beautiful and interesting way, and that sort of perversity defines Ballard’s aesthetic.

SS: For my PhD, I was researching contemporary attitudes towards modernist architecture and came across the critical reaction to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. I was completely shocked by Simon Jenkins’ response, which verged on demonic possession. He took particular exception to modernist architects, who he said were ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’, and equates them with Hitler. (But as Deyan Sudjic riposted, such a caricature misrepresents ‘the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression… none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went’.) Why does Brutalist architecture in Britain continue to provoke such rage?

NC: The British establishment, and the English in particular, still have a real suspicion of architectural modernism, seeing it as ‘elitist’, ‘European’ and ’socialist’. Brutalism especially has become a scapegoat for the failure of that post-war welfare state optimism. Of course, this is rubbish: the real failure lies in the political and cultural failure to actually bring about a more egalitarian and democratic society.

SS: On the other hand, as the antithesis to Jenkins, Ballard said: ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton’.

NC: I always imagine that Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes was designed by someone like Manser. But lets face it, we can’t always trust such pronouncements by Jim, especially if it was for the benefit of the Guardian — imagine all that liberal angst and hand wringing.

SS: In his review of Davis’s City of Quartz, Ballard welcomes ‘unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride’. He suggests that architects and urban planners need to ‘make the most of this’, letting the environment guide them almost as if it is sentient, rather than conforming to the reverse, ie, the old ideal of the arrogant architect imposing his grand vision on the environment (in High-Rise, this was the downfall of the architect Royal). Do you agree with Ballard?

NC: ‘Unrestricted’ would be the key term; the brilliance of Davis’s analysis is to show how clearly urban planning follows such a narrow set of vested interests. Less planning, less controls, less regulation would only work if it also meant less greed, and what are the chances of that? It reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote on the free market: ‘it sounds like a great idea, maybe we should try it sometime’.

“The thrill that every whim will soon be a reality”

The ad for Trumpdubai’s latest hallucination must be seen to be believed, or as the website puts it “believing is seeing”. www.Trumpdubai.com

SS: Rem Koolhaas seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the architects in Ballard’s stories: the ego, the vainglory, the architect as self-styled eccentric…

NC: He probably likes to think he does. I like Ballard’s architects: they seem genuinely optimistic and have a faith, albeit misguided, in the power of architecture to change society for the good. They are of a much older generation — Ballard’s. I bet Robert Maitland would send angry letters into Building Design, the weekly British architectural newspaper, complaining about these new-fangled projects.

Rem’s recent work, especially in China, strikes me as cynical. His obsession with celebrity, especially his own, seems to be his main driving force, and like many ‘good’ Marxists of his generation, he has become a consummate capitalist. He is much more like Wilder Penrose from Super-Cannes — without the humour.

SS: Does architecture still have an image problem, then, in terms of this archetype of the arrogant, narcissistic architect imposing his vision on the people?

NC: Yes, because most of us are arrogant and narcissistic.

Jean Nouvel’s proposed opera house

SS: In books such as Concrete Island and stories like ‘The Ultimate City’, Ballard depicts architecture as an instrument of oppressive capitalism, and architects as contributing to that oppression. For Ballard, it seems to me, no architect can be truly radical, or can truly think of architecture as ‘art’ when they are either carrying out the wishes of the State, mobilising state funds to realise their designs, or carrying out the desires of big business. Is this an accurate summation of architectural practice today? How would you reconcile that frustration with a pure creative spirit?

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.’

Little has changed since; in fact, things have got worse. Architecture is now synonymous with the architectural profession (or Corporate Architectural Complex), speculation is financial rather than intellectual, and architects have been complicit with the kind of greedy thinking and acting that has got us into the current global financial crisis. We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings — that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.

SS: Ballard says that ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us.’ Any thoughts on that?

NC: For novelty architecture, see my answer on Rem. A couple of years ago I used the phrase ‘Shapist Architecture’, taken from Tony Hancock’s 1961 film The Rebel, a satire on the art world. At one point he says, ‘I don’t paint the object, I paint the shape around the object’. Developments in the use of computer software have allowed architects to come up with a variety of three-dimensional forms, which has led to a whole raft of ‘blobby’ buildings, a lot of which appear to be self-indulgent and that confuse ‘looking interesting’ with ‘being interesting’ and ‘looking complex’ with ‘complexity’. We have an architecture of the image.

The object on the right that looks like a child’s drawing of a rainstorm is a proposal for a building.

SS: In Ballard, architecture is often used as a form of social control. Did you perceive any similarities between the nature and cause of the banlieue riots in France in 2005, and the breakdown of society depicted in High-Rise?

NC: Not really. High Rise is about a rejection of convivial social structures and returning to a more ‘primitive’ social model. There is a brilliant French film from 1973 called Themroc
directed by Claude Faraldo, which seems to have a greater affinity with High-Rise, published two years later. In it, a blue-collar worker rejects his mundane life, knocks the front wall out of his apartment and starts living like a caveman. However, Kingdom Come, in many ways, does describes the type of anomie and alienation that dominates the urban periphery. Boredom and disenfranchisement brought about by simply being defined by what we consume are the most incendiary factors in the contemporary city.

SS: Do you think Ballard has much at all to do with psychogeographical conceptions of urban space? He appears to have been co-opted into the ‘movement’, such as it is.

NC: It seems everyone’s a psychogeographer nowadays. Psychogeography was originally articulated by the Situationists as an experimental form of urbanism that attempted a critique of the hegemonic values of urban planning and zoning by emphasising the ‘transience’ of the urban experience. The political aspect of psychogeography has been diminished in favour of a ‘poetics’ of the city. I think Ballard in some of his writing retains a lot more of that political conception of psychogeography than many who have fashionably co-opted that term.

SS: What role does film, video, animation and motion graphics play in your course? How can film methodology help to illuminate architectural design?

NC: My main interest in time-based techniques is the ability to tell stories. However, at a pedagogic level, working with film, video and animation does teach a whole number of organisational and aesthetic skills, so despite my anti-profession rhetoric, I seem to be doing a very good job in equipping students to operate very successfully within the profession.

SS: In The Atrocity Exhibition, there are many scenarios in which mental patients are encouraged to make their own films as therapy. Without wishing to casting aspersions on the mental health of your students(!), were the many references to DIY film aesthetics in the book an inspiration for your decision to use Ballard and film as a way into thinking about architecture? (Recall that in Atrocity, these amateur films recast the media landscape and the built environment in ‘ways that make sense’.)

NC: The way I teach is very much geared toward helping students find a voice, whether that is therapeutic is unimportant (to me) — besides, I hate that psychoanalytic model of teaching, just as much as I hate the paternalistic model.

SS: Sure, but I wasn’t really referring to the thereaputic aspects, though, more the DIY angle and the mediation of the built environment.

NC: The main decision to start using film in the way I teach architecture, which I have been doing since 1999, was simply because it was what I was doing myself. The rise of CGI, animation and the availability of digital video made it a much more accessible and viable way of generating, developing and communicating architectural and spatial ideas and narratives. The influence of lo-fi (as opposed to DIY) artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Nauman or Burroughs was an attraction, but it was the availability of the technology that got me going.

SS: Do you think Ballard is an especially ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ writer?

NC: Yes, which is why the English literary establishment still treats him with suspicion since he is not a ‘literary’ writer. Ballard wants to create images and tell stories rather than impress with literary form.

SS: I think the films your students have turned out are simply stunning, especially considering they don’t have a ’studio budget’ to work with — the filmmakers, as well as you and everyone involved, should be applauded. But besides making films, you also looked at feature-film versions of Ballard’s work. How can an analysis of these adaptations help in understanding ’speculative, narrative architectures’ in Ballard’s writing?

NC: I have taken this particular position for two reasons: to engage with a critique of contemporary architecture, and because it’ s fun. The filmic analysis was just a starting point; out of all the films we watched, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition and Sinclair and Petit’s London Orbital were the most influential.

Architecture should not be left to architects — the whole discourse needs opening up. The reason why I earlier questioned whether architectural criticism exists is simply because architecture is an incredibly insular and hermetic discipline — no one dares criticise the Rems, the Dannys or the Zahas for fear of being locked out. Magazines need content and they publish pretty much anything and everything without questioning it; if they did question it, then the content would dry up.

SS: It’s good to see Jonathan Weiss’s film gaining recognition. What do you appreciate about it?

NC: The fact that he had the guts to take it on with virtually no budget. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most ‘Burroughsian’ of all Ballard’s writing and I think Weiss has captured that. The use of found footage and the dislocated time line have echoes in the literary character of the book, and bits of the film are extremely beautiful to look at. I can’t stand the criticism that it doesn’t make sense or is difficult: these criticisms seem to ignore the difficulties of the original text.

SS: Who else do you think would make a good fist of adapting Ballard?

NC: Taakishi Miike to direct High Rise as a total gore-fest, Michael Mann to direct Super-Cannes — and I’m working on an adaptation of ‘Motel Architecture’.

SS: Taakishi Miike? Good call! But tell me about your own adaptation.

NC: I’m going through the shower scene from Pyscho frame by frame to develop the analysis that JG alludes to in ‘Motel Architecture’. I’ve mapped out a rough script and hope to shoot something in the new year. Part of what I am doing for ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design I’m guest editing, will be based on this project (some sort of ‘House Of The Future’) — the other part is an essay/rant against the architectural profession.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978).

SS: The guest issue of AD was originally going to be explicitly ‘Ballardian, wasn’t it?

NC: The publication, in its current form, has changed from being explicitly about Ballard and Ballard’s writings to something more general: an antidote to the shiny ‘bigness’, ‘everything’s great’ vision of contemporary architecture presented by the mainstream architectural press. The guiding principles are still thoroughly ‘Ballardian’, even though I have opened the discussion up. I would still like to do a purely Ballardian book and will use The Near Future as a first step.

This is the blurb for the issue, which I think neatly sums up my aims for the whole Near Future project:

For the last 20 years, the architectural profession has been complicit with the laissez-faire ideology of late capitalism, assuming that the economic forces of growth and expansion are the only means by which society can develop and prosper.

The current economic crisis makes us question whether a future of unlimited growth is not only possible, but taking into account environmental factors, actually advisable. We have reached a moment of crisis — economic, environmental and technological — where we have to make choices about the type of future that we want, but also the type of future we can actually achieve.

It would appear that the Architectural Profession has nothing to say except ‘business as usual’, as it continues to produce bright, shiny renders of schemes that will sit empty for years. This proposed issue of Architectural Design offers a series of alternate voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and trying to find visions of the future, not simply images of the future.

The Hydropolis underwater hotel where local dredging operations can be viewed in style. 

The proposed issue offers a diverse set of ideas that explore a number of possible ‘Near Futures’ — futures that may be influenced the resurgence of gout in Swindon, or take precedent from an analysis of the political landscape of Southern Italy where in some areas a state of effective lawlessness exists.

The issue combines critical analysis with gorgeous graphics, and features work produced at the margins of contemporary architectural practice. Drawing on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, post-modern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, developments in neurology as well as the fictional writings of authors such as J G Ballard and William Gibson, ‘The Near Future’ will present a series of polemical blasts that are intended to rock the cosy world of architectural discourse.

Zaha Hadid’s proposed opera house

Thank you, Nic Clear and Unit 15. ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic, will be published in September 2009.

Thanks from Void to the Ballardian for this interview

The Thunderbolt roller coaster coney island.

Storm the reality studio.

And retake the universe.

-William S. Burroughs

                     More evidence that we got problems.

                              Now this is more like it.

First printed in the HUMANE REVIEW, January, 1901.

Reprinted as pamphlet several times, most recently by CGH Services, c.1992 and Jura Media, 1996

MEN of such high standing in hygiene and biology having made a profound study of questions relating to normal food, I shall take good care not to display my incompetence by expressing an opinion as to animal and vegetable nourishment. Let the cobbler stick to his last. As I am neither chemist nor doctor, I shall not mention either azote or albumen, nor reproduce the formulas of analysts, but shall content myself simply with giving my own personal impressions, which, at all events, coincide with those of many vegetarians. I shall move within the circle of my own experiences, stopping here and there to set down some observation suggested by the petty incidents of life.

First of all I should say that the search for truth had nothing to do with the early impressions which made me a potential vegetarian while still a small boy wearing baby-frocks. I have a distinct remembrance of horror at the sight of blood. One of the family had sent me, plate in hand, to the village butcher, with the injunction to bring back some gory fragment or other. In all innocence I set out cheerfully to do as I was bid, and entered the yard where the slaughtermen were. I still remember this gloomy yard where terrifying men went to and fro with great knives, which they wiped on blood-besprinkled smocks. Hanging from a porch an enormous carcase seemed to me to occupy an extraordinary amount of space; from its white flesh a reddish liquid was trickling into the gutters. Trembling and silent I stood in this blood-stained yard incapable of going forward and too much terrified to run away. I do not know what happened to me ; it has passed from my memory. I seem to have heard that I fainted, and that the kind-hearted butcher carried roe into his own house ; I did not weigh more than one of those lambs he slaughtered every morning.

Other pictures cast their shadows over my childish years, and, like that glimpse of the slaughter-house, mark so many epochs in my life. I can see the sow belonging to some peasants, amateur butchers, and therefore all the more cruel. I remember one of them bleeding the animal slowly, so that the blood fell drop by drop; for, in order to make really good black puddings, it appears essential that the victim should have suffered proportionately. She cried without ceasing, now and then uttering groans and sounds of despair almost human; it seemed like listening to a child.

And in fact the domesticated pig is for a year or so a child of the house ; pampered that he may grow fat, and returning a sincere affection for all the care lavished on him, which has but one aim – so many inches of bacon. But when the affection is reciprocated by the good woman who takes care of the pig, fondling him and speaking in terms of endearment to him, is she not considered ridiculous – as if it were absurd, even degrading, to love an animal that loves us?

One of the strongest impressions of my childhood is that of having witnessed one of those rural dramas, the forcible killing of a pig by a party of villagers in revolt against a dear old woman who would not consent to the murder of her fat friend. The village crowd burst into the pigstye and dragged the beast to the slaughter place where all the apparatus for the deed stood waiting, whilst the unhappy dame sank down upon a stool weeping quiet tears. I stood beside her and saw those tears without knowing whether I should sympathise with her grief, or think with the crowd that the killing of the pig was just, legitimate, decreed by common sense as well as by destiny.

Each of us, especially those who have lived in a provincial spot, far away from vulgar ordinary towns, where everything is methodically classed and disguised – each of us has seen something of these barbarous acts committed by flesh-eaters against the beasts they eat. There is no need to go into some Porcopolis of North America, or into a saladero of La Plata, to contemplate the horrors of the massacres which constitute the primary condition of our daily food. But these impressions wear off in time; they yield before the baneful influence of daily education, which tends to drive the individual towards mediocrity, and takes out of him anything that goes to the making of an original personality. Parents, teachers, official or friendly, doctors, not to speak of the powerful individual whom we call “everybody,” all work together to harden the character of the child with respect to this “four-footed food,” which, nevertheless, loves as we do, feels as we do, and, under our influence, progresses or retrogresses as we do.

It is just one of the sorriest results of our flesh-eating habits that the animals sacrificed to man’s appetite have been systematically and methodically made hideous, shapeless, and debased in intelligence and moral worth. The name even of the animal into which the boar has been transformed is used as the grossest of insults ; the mass of flesh we see wallowing in noisome pools is so loathsome to look at that we agree to avoid all similarity of name between the beast and the dishes we make out of it. What a difference there is between the moufflon’s appearance and habits as he skips about upon the mountain rocks, and that of the sheep which has lost all individual initiative and becomes mere debased flesh-so timid that it dares not leave the flock, running headlong into the jaws of the dog that pursues it. A similar degradation has befallen the ox, whom now-a-days we see moving with difficulty in the pastures, transformed by stock-breeders into an enormous ambulating mass of geometrical forms, as if designed beforehand for the knife of the butcher. And it is to the production of such monstrosities we apply the term “breeding”! This is how man fulfils his mission as educator with respect to his brethren, the animals.

For the matter of that, do we not act in like manner towards all Nature? Turn loose a pack of engineers into a charming valley, in the midst of fields and trees, or on the banks of some beautiful river, and you will soon see w hat they would do. They would do everything in their power to put their own work in evidence, and to mask Nature under their heaps of broken stones and coal. All of them would be proud, at least, to see their locomotives streaking the sky with a network of dirty yellow or black smoke. Sometimes these engineers even take it upon themselves to improve Nature. Thus, when the Belgian artists protested recently to the Minister of Railroads against his desecration of the most beautiful parts of the Meuse by blowing up the picturesque rocks along its banks, the Minister hastened to assure them that henceforth they should have nothing to complain about, as he would pledge himself to build all the new workshops with Gothic turrets!

In a similar spirit the butchers display before the eyes of the public, even in the most frequented streets, disjointed carcasses, gory lumps of meat, and think to conciliate our æstheticism by boldly decorating the flesh they hang out with garlands of roses!

When reading the papers, one wonders if all the atrocities of the war in China are not a bad dream instead of a lamentable reality. How can it be that men having had the happiness of being caressed by their mother, and taught in school the words “justice” and “kindness,” how can it be that these wild beasts with human faces take pleasure in tying Chinese together by their garments and their pigtails before throwing them into a river? How is it that they kill off the wounded, and make the prisoners dig their own graves before shooting them? And who are these frightful assassins? They are men like ourselves, who study and read as we do, w ha have brothers, friends, a wife or a sweetheart ; sooner or later we run the chance of meeting them, of taking them by the hand without seeing any traces of blood there.

But is there not some direct relation of cause and effect between the food of these executioners, who call themselves “agents of civilisation,” and their ferocious deeds? They, too, are in the habit of praising the bleeding flesh as a generator of health, strength, and intelligence. They, too, enter without repugnance the slaughter house, where the pavement is red and slippery, and where one breathes the sickly sweet odour of blood. Is there then so much difference between the dead body of a bullock and that of a man? The dissevered limbs, the entrails mingling one with the other, are very much alike : the slaughter of the first makes easy the murder of the second, especially when a leader’s order rings out, or from afar comes the word of the crowned master, “Be pitiless.”

A French proverb says that “every bad case can be defended.” This saying had a certain amount of truth in it so long as the soldiers of each nation committed their barbarities separately, for the atrocities attributed to them could afterwards be put down to jealousy and national hatred. But in China, now, the Russians, French, English, and Germans have not the modesty to attempt to screen each other. Eyewitnesses, and even the authors themselves, have sent us information in every language, some cynically, and others with reserve. The truth is no longer denied, but a new morality has been created to explain it. This morality says there are two laws for mankind, one applies to the yellow races and the other is the privilege of the white. To assassinate or torture the first named is, it seems, henceforth permissible, whilst it is wrong to do so to the second.

Is not our morality, as applied to animals, equally elastic? Harking on dogs to tear a fox to pieces teaches a gentleman how to make his men pursue the fugitive Chinese. The two kinds of hunt belong to one and the same “sport” ; only, when the victim is a man, the excitement and pleasure are probably all the keener. Need we ask the opinion of him who recently invoked the name of Attila, quoting this monster as a model for his soldiers?

It is not a digression to mention the horrors of war in connection with the massacre of cattle and carnivorous banquets. The diet of individuals corresponds closely to their manners. Blood demands blood. On this point any one who searches among his recollections of the people whom he has known will find there can be no possible doubt as to the contrast which exists between vegetarians and coarse eaters of flesh, greedy drinkers of blood, in amenity of manner, gentleness of disposition and regularity of life.

It is true these are qualities not highly esteemed by those “superior persons,” who, without being in any way better than other mortals, are always more arrogant, and imagine they add to their own importance by depreciating the humble and exalting the strong. According to them, mildness signifies feebleness : the sick are only in the way, and it would be a charity to get rid of them. If they are not killed, they should at least be allowed to die. But it is just these delicate people who resist disease better than the robust. Full-blooded and high-coloured men are not always those who live longest : the really strong are not necessarily those who carry their strength on the surface, in a ruddy complexion, distended muscle, or a sleek and oily stoutness. Statistics could give us positive information on this point, and would have done so already, but for the numerous interested persons who devote so much time to grouping, in battle array, figures, whether true or false, to defend their respective theories.

But, however this may be, we say simply that, for the great majority of vegetarians, the question is not whether their biceps and triceps are more solid than those of the flesh-eaters, nor whether their organism is better able to resist the risks of life and the chances of death, which is even more important : for them the important point is the recognition of the bond of affection and goodwill that links man to the so-called lower animals, and the extension to these our brothers of the sentiment which has already put a stop to cannibalism among men. The reasons which might be pleaded by anthropophagists against the disuse of human flesh in their customary diet would be as well-founded as those urged by ordinary flesh-eaters today. The arguments that were opposed to that monstrous habit are precisely those we vegetarians employ now. The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the cat, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat. We wish to preserve them either as respected fellow-workers, or simply as companions in the joy of life and friendship.

“But,” you will say, “if you abstain from the flesh of animals, other flesh-eaters, men or beasts, will eat them instead of you, or else hunger and the elements will combine to destroy them.” Without doubt the balance of the species will be maintained, as formerly, in conformity with the chances of life and the inter-struggle of appetites ; but at least in the conflict of the races the profession of destroyer shall not be ours. We will so deal with the part of the earth which belongs to us as to make it as pleasant as possible, not only for ourselves, but also for the beasts of our household. We shall take up seriously the educational rôle which has been claimed by man since prehistoric times. Our share of responsibility in the transformation of the existing order of things does not extend beyond ourselves and our immediate neighbourhood. If we do but little, this little will at least be our work.

One thing is certain, that if we held the chimerical idea of pushing the practice of our theory to its ultimate and logical consequences, without caring for considerations of another kind, we should fall into simple absurdity. In this respect the principle of vegetarianism does not differ from any other principle; it must be suited to the ordinary conditions of life. It is clear that we have no intention of subordinating all our practices and actions, of every hour and every minute, to a respect for the life of the infinitely little; we shall not let ourselves die of hunger and thirst, like some Buddhist, when the microscope has shown us a drop of water swarming with animalculæ. We shall not hesitate now and then to cut ourselves a stick in the forest, or to pick a flower in a garden; we shall even go so far as to take a lettuce, or cut cabbages and asparagus for our food, although we fully recognise the life in the plant as well as in animals. But it is not for us to found a new religion, and to hamper ourselves with a sectarian dogma ; it is a question of making our existence as beautiful as possible, and in harmony, so far as in us lies, with the æsthetic conditions of our surroundings.

Just as our ancestors, becoming disgusted with eating their fellow-creatures, one fine day left off serving them up to their tables; just as now, among flesh-eaters, there are many who refuse to eat the flesh of man’s noble companion, the horse, or of our fireside pets, the dog and cat-so is it distasteful to us to drink the blood and chew the muscle of the ox, whose labour helps to grow our corn. We no longer want to hear the bleating of sheep, the bellowing of bullocks, the groans and piercing shrieks of the pigs, as they are led to the slaughter. We aspire to the time when we shall not have to walk swiftly to shorten that hideous minute of passing the haunts of butchery with their rivulets of blood and rows of sharp hooks, whereon carcasses are hung up by blood-stained men, armed with horrible knives. We want some day to live in a city where we shall no longer see butchers’ shops full of dead bodies side by side with drapers’ or jewellers’, and facing a druggist’s, or hard by a window filled with choice fruits, or with beautiful books, engravings or statuettes, and works of art. We want an environment pleasant to the eye and in harmony with beauty.

And since physiologists, or better still, since our own experience tells us that these ugly joints of meat are not a form of nutrition necessary for our existence, we put aside all these hideous foods which our ancestors found agreeable, and the majority of our contemporaries still enjoy. We hope before long that flesh-eaters will at least have the politeness to hide their food. Slaughter houses are relegated to distant suburbs ; let the butchers’ shops be placed there too, where, like stables, they shall be concealed in obscure corners.

It is on account of the ugliness of it that we also abhor vivisection and all dangerous experiments, except when they are practised by the man of science on his own person. It is the ugliness of the deed which fills us with disgust when we see a naturalist pinning live butterflies into his box, or destroying an ant-hill in order to count the ants. We turn with dislike from the engineer who robs Nature of her beauty by imprisoning a cascade in conduit-pipes, and from the Californian woodsman who cuts down a tree, four thousand years old and three hundred feet high, to show its rings at fairs and exhibitions. Ugliness in persons, in deeds, in life, in surrounding Nature-this is our worst foe. Let us become beautiful ourselves, and let our life be beautiful!

What then are the foods which seem to correspond better with our ideal of beauty both in their nature and in their needful methods of preparation? They are precisely those which from all time have been appreciated by men of simple life; the foods which can do best without the lying artifices of the kitchen. They are eggs, grains, fruits; that is to say, the products of animal and vegetable life which represent in their organisms both the temporary arrest of vitality and the concentration of the elements necessary to the formation of new lives. The egg of the animal, the seed of the plant, the fruits of the tree, are the end of an organism which is no more, and the beginning of an organism which does not yet exist. Man gets them for his food without killing the being that provides them, since they are formed at the point of contact between two generations. Do not our men of science who study organic chemistry tell us, too, that the egg of the animal or plant is the best storehouse of every vital element? Omne vivum ex ovo.

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe 

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live thirty miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live thirty miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work…

enough for all.

                  -Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it’s habitable. Architecture can’t do anything that the culture doesn’t. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.” —Rem Koohaas interview in Wired magazine 4.07, July 1996 [1]

“To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” - Le Corbusier

“You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.” -Frank Gehry

“I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” – James Joyce

Compared to the bleakness of scientists stealing brains from rat fetuses and placing them in robots, I felt that Schopenhauer’s grim musings would be gleeful.

“There are only pessimists and liars”-Paul Virilio