London - a global city (2)

I very rarely ask my readers to immediately click on an image when they visit my blog, but today is an exception. So click! (but do please come back in a second or two to finish reading).

As promised, it is the second highlight of the Global cities exhibition at the Tate Modern over the summer. Part of a larger work, (bits of which can be read here and also here), it's more of an pictorially annotated essay than fine art, but is a thought-provoking work all the same. The second link is particularly thought provoking, about how planned architecture is a thing of the past - the public sector is now less influential in developing cities, there are no grand ideological theories of architecture as there are no public purses to patronise them. 'Architects no longer write manifestos. At most they write portraits of particular cities... an absence of a utopian drive is perhaps almost as serious as an overdose of it.'

I have always had an admiration for the architects of the 50's, 60's and 70's, who built - often but not always - buildings which, by today's (and probably most eras' standards) look horrific. The reason they built those modernist buildings was because they were constructing a new utopia for all. There's an urban myth that the architect of Peckham actually hanged herself when she saw how it had turned out. I don't know whether or not it's true, but there was certainly a lot of passion that went into the new architecture.

Letters!

I've just remembered my pledge to capitalise one letter of the header for every building that got completed.

The Willis Building is now complete, externally at least, so it's about time I capitalised on this (ho hum).

But which letter?

That's where YOU come in. Please vote below (I'm not letting you vote for the first letter of each word as that would detract from the statement).

Better safe than sorry

Not so long ago I mentioned a safety sign at the Leadenhall Building site, which informed you about what you were and weren't allowed to do, and was critical of the fact it warns you about so many things that it all becomes a jumbled message and you're not sure what's dangerous and what's not by the time you get to the end.

I also came across a construction site proudly proclaiming their safety record of 757520 manhours without an accident.

Today I shall continue my review of safety signs.

This one is for a demolition site near Cannon Street Station, where they are demolishing fire station. It's a classic example of the "No smoking: Got that... Always wear a hard hat: Check!... Wear boots: Okey doke... High visibility jackets must be worn at all times: What was the first thing again?" style of safety sign.

One element, which may well be present on all safety signs is the phrase:

Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 all persons entering this site must comply with all regulations under this act.

Which raises 2 questions:

1. What is the "etc."? "...and egg!" ?
   
2. Can an act contain within it instructions that it must be obeyed? Surely not, else we'd have a strange loop of an act on our hands.
   

Quite a boring functional one, this. Only point of interest is the grammatical typo: "Warning sites are hazardous places."

Sorry, did I call that a point of interest? I'm getting slack.

Here is a link to something more interesting.

Here is a much better attempt at a useful sign, inspired by the first world war posters, I think.

It's a very clear design, enabling the casual labourer to systematically go over his body checking for compliance. Might I suggest that they put a full size mirror next to the sign as then it'd simply be a case of checking that the image on the left matches the one on the right.

Well done Skanska (more on them later).

London - a global city (1)

Has anyone else seen the fantasy piccadilly line maps? I very rarely travel on the piccadilly line, but last weekend I did and saw the map, which has a futuristic vision of what London might be like.

It's not very good, but reminded me that I need to write about the exhibition Tate Modern had in the turbine hall this summer called Global cities (alas it's now been replaced by a crack - damn my tardiness!!!). I went to see it with my Auntie Eirlys, Cousin Miklos and his toddler daughter Alessandra, all three of them visiting from Canada.

I thought it was a great exhibition. As with a lot of exhibitions I couldn't help thinking that the exhibits could be split into two categories:

• It's definitely art, but I don't think it's any good
• It's brilliant, but I'm not altogether sure it's art

The exhibition was essentially about various cities around the world that seem to exemplify the changes of globalisation, ranging from the very poor (Delhi, Cairo), to the rapidly developing (Mexico City, Beijing), to the fully developed (London, Tokyo). It compared things such as standard of living, density of population, levels of immigration... very much the kind of exhibition you'd expect in a museum, not an art gallery.

The 'it's definitely art' bits of the exhibition I thought generally fell short of the Chindia exhibition I saw a few months ago. The more borderline 'not art things' fared better though. The highlight by a long way was the population density models. They looked like man-made termite mounds. In the photo, London is in the bottom right, Mexico city top left, and delhi and cairo the other two (not sure in which order). So, if you think London is densely populated, think again! Delhi and Cairo are about 10 times more packed. (More photos)

They are art, aren't they. I know they are essentially just graphs made out of plywood, but they also cause a sense of astonishment and wonderment, and impress the meaning behind the numbers upon you far more effectively than a conventional representation could.

I noted in an earlier post that the population of the City of London (i.e. the square mile) is tiny. This model really highlights that with a deep depression right in the centre of London.

I'll write about the other piece of art in another post as this is getting quite lengthy.

More considerate constructors

Broadgate Tower is being built by considerate constructors, that much we know. But what of the other building sites in the city. Do they also display the telltale signs of being of considerate construct?

The answer is a resounding "YES!" on the whole. (Now, what with the use of " " to denote irony in popular culture, you're probably not sure if that was a sincere quoted yes, or a sarcastic yes, but one paying no heed to grammar. It was, I can assure you, a sincere quoted one.)
Here's a breakdown of considerate and inconsiderate constructors:

Considerate

• Broadgate Tower
• Leadenhall Building
• Heron Tower
• Dashwood House
• Norton Folgate
• Crown Place

Inconsiderate

• Bishopsgate Tower
• A site on Bevis Marks, near the Gherkin

The considerate constructors scheme is 20 years old this year according to one poster (*edit* it turns out that this is for the considerate contractor scheme - a different thing entirely). Curiously the scheme's website claims it's only 10 years old, which makes sense to me as if it was any older it would have been set up under a tory government, and I can't see the tories ever doing anything considerate. the website also has a useful guide to what being a considerate constructor entails; there is a 108 point checklist!

The Leadenhall building participates in the scheme, and here are a couple of examples of exemplary considerate practice.
Painting steps yellow so that people see they're not just a piece of fence.

Covering the temporary fence sealing off the building site with strips of metal where it brushes up against a coffee shop's outdoor seating area in order to give a calming, glittery effect. It's unlikely to completely convince diners that there isn't a huge demolition site on the other side, but nice try all the same.

Zoning out

This is a picture of zone 2. The reason I made it is because I was going to write a post about one of my major bug bears, that the zone extends much further out to the affluent west than it does in the poor east (judging by the number of stations contained within the zone on the tube map).

However, drawing it out on an undistorted map shows that both zone 1 and zone 2 are fairly equitable with regard to how far out they extend to East and West from central london (central London being Oxford Circus). Took the wind right out of my sails. I was going to write a barnstorming polemic about the unreported discrimination against London's poor by the wealthy inhabitants of Hammersmith, Fulham and Kensington and Chelsea. I was going to write to Ken Livingstone, asking him to add restructuring the zones to his election manifesto.

But it turns out they're pretty much ok as they are.

Citizen's band

*edit: If you're looking to download and mp3 of Citizen's Band by Super Furry Animals, it's now here: http://wheresrhys.co.uk/2009/03/citizens-band-by-sfa/

Not related at all to skyscrapers, this post, but I think someone should put it up somewhere on the web as I serached way too long and hard for an answer.

A while back I transferred all my CDs onto my PC, and this is how I now listen to music. However, there were always a few tracks (Citizen's Band by Super Furry Animals (hidden track off Guerrilla)) and even whole albums (Hail to the Thief by Radiohead, Lazer Guided Melodies by Spiritualized) which I could not rip using any standard music software.

A painstaking search of the internet last night (after realising I hadn't listened to citizen's band since disposing of my clapped out stereo nearly 3 years ago) found an answer to downloading pregap and protected tracks from CDs. In short:

• Download and install Exact audio copy
  
• When prompted, download and unzip the LAME.EXE encoder
• Stick the CD in the drive
• Either:
  Go to Actions>Copy range and select the bit before 0s to record pregap tacks
  or
  Select all the protected tracks you want and click on mp3

To save anyone who's specifically looking for citizen's band (one of the very best super furries songs) the effort, here is a link to where I've uploaded it: http://www.fileshost.com/en/file/10294/Citizen-s-band-mp3.html (after typing in the numbers scroll to the bottom for the download link).

Shapes

A very quick (and slightly late) post to highlight that this week and next the Guardian is giving away free poster booklets on great works of modern architecture.

A deliberate attempt to undermine Simon Jenkins' opposition to children's toy shape architecture?

I've been collecting them and so far the Guggenheim Bilbao is my fave. Mainly because it is mostly on one side of a flyover, but defiantly pops up a tower on the other side.