A New Kind of Bleak. Owen Hatherley
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its design language stays at such a low voltage.
That’s something which becomes especially clear with the transition to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. This late-nineteenth-century hospital was closed in 2002, with its functions transferred to nearby University College Hospital. The complex required a complete restoration of its much smaller, cosier rooms, with the original tiles and fireplaces scrupulously pieced back together. Sometimes this leads to enjoyably surreal juxtapositions, as when a vaguely art nouveau fireplace sits unused in the corner of a video conference room. Irrespective of the TUC’s brief foray into high modernism, the most famous visual image of trade unionism is deeply Arts and Crafts-influenced – the embroidered trade union banners that are still carried on marches, where the aesthetics of William Morris socialism, in a pre-branding era, still have a vivid emotional role. Framed with foliage, symmetrically organized and allegorical, sometimes you even find architectural modernism immortalized on them. One RMT banner I spotted on a protest a few months ago was centred on an image of Charles Holden’s Arnos Grove station. This powerful language is at least partly present in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson building. In its main room, which is being adapted as a museum, with interactive exhibits on feminism, the health service and trade unionism, there is remade Arts and Crafts furniture (that you can sit on, for once) and a small library stocked with the likes of Friedrich Engels, Mary Wollstonecraft and Sheila Rowbotham. If the rest of the building avoids traditional notions of what trade unionism looks like, here there’s a reminder, and it’s a quietly powerful one. Perhaps this is a project which needed rhetoric and imagery as much as clarity and spaciousness. While Squire and Partners clearly took the place very seriously, a more nonconformist firm might have reconciled the traditional and forward-looking impulses of the union in a more forthright, convincing, dialectical way. Instead, the pretty but mute faceted roof of the atrium provides the main connection. Maybe the commission should have been given to the Radical Postmodernists at FAT.
The atrium also leads the pedestrian towards the housing that was demanded by planning – deceptively so, as there is no public access. It’s a decent, unspectacular, stock-brick scheme of houses and flats, ‘mixed’ as ever, and clearly demarcated between the private element facing one way and the ‘social’ side the other, with both quite aggressively gated from the street. You’re reminded that the context is the redevelopment of Somers Town and King’s Cross, a working-class, industrial area of dense council housing undergoing severe gentrification, from commercial architects HOK’s BioMed Centre behind the British Library, that was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing, to the new St Pancras International or the King’s Place commercial development. It’s the sort of area where unions used to thrive, now being completely transformed. The Unison building shows trade unionism transforming in turn, and in that, it’s an optimistic, encouraging building, an enclave of sobriety and solidarity in amidst the regen tat. It stands its ground, quietly.
Agency (2): The Students Take the Squares
Sometimes, the self-referential, apolitical world of architecture intersects with politics in unexpected ways. In the same week as the student occupations spread, on the same day as the ‘Day X 2’ demonstration organized by student protesters against cuts and fee rises,3 there was a story in the local and architectural press that summed up much of what the students were fighting against.
This was the granting of planning permission to something called ‘The Quill’, a tower of student housing aimed by developers at students from King’s College. It’s a fine example of contemporary architectural idiocy, a lumpen glass extrusion full of clumsy symbolism – the flurry of steel spikes that gives it its name is ‘inspired by the literary heritage of Southwark’ – but it’s a reminder that students are far from the privileged, cloistered group that some present them as. It’s the obnoxiously detailed tip of an iceberg, of the pile-up of awful student housing that has resulted from the partial privatization of education. Developers have made large quantities of money out of some of the bleakest housing ever built in the UK, marketing it as student accommodation usually on sites which would otherwise be allotted to ‘luxury flats’ or other ‘stunning developments’. Student-oriented property developers like Unite (no relation) and the amusingly named Liberty Living are, amongst other things, revivalists of the prefabricated construction methods favoured by the more parsimonious councils in the 1960s, and their blocks, all with attendant ‘aspirational’ names – Sky Plaza in Leeds, Grand Central in Liverpool – recall the worst side of modernism, in their cheapness, blindness to place, and total lack of architectural imagination. Inside, they’re a matter of box rooms leavened by en-suite bathrooms, charging outrageous rents; the most apparently ‘luxurious’ of them, the skyscraping Nido Spitalfields, charges £1,250 a month for each of its self-described ‘cubes’.
They’re also a reminder that students were encouraged under New Labour to be an ideal combination of indentured serfs and aspirant yuppies; the actual conditions of students’ existence in the 2000s, from the poverty of their housing, to their catastrophic debt, to their part-time jobs in call centres, to their years of unpaid intern labour, were bleak indeed; but all was hidden by an oxymoronic language of inclusivity and privilege; you might be living in a cupboard, but it’s a cupboard with a plasma screen TV; you might seem to be underpaid, overworked and tithed, but you were constantly reminded how lucky you were to be able to enjoy the hedonistic student lifestyle. Suddenly, under the Tory–Whig coalition, one half of that bargain – the expansion of education that accompanied its part-privatization – has disappeared, and we’re now witnessing the fallout. So it’s worth keeping New Labour’s student architecture – desperately private, paranoid, gated, restricted, securitized – in mind when you consider the dozens of occupations of universities and public buildings that were such an important part of the student protests. Implicitly or explicitly, this is the kind of space they are reacting against. A protest against the coalition, to be sure; but it’s also a magnificent rejection of the fear, quietism and atomization that was the result of earlier policies. Their use of space is equally fearless.
The first major explosion around the programme of drastic education cuts – well before the trebling of fees was announced – was at the University of Middlesex in April 2010. The coalition’s aggressively philistine and class-driven rhetoric was amply foreshadowed here, in the closing of the college’s most successful programme: its Continental Philosophy department, a programme encouraging critical thinking which was clearly considered surplus to requirements at an ex-Polytechnic orienting itself towards Business, or lucrative overseas campuses in Dubai and Mauritius, spreading itself to the ‘emerging economies’ like any architectural firm. The interesting thing about Middlesex University is how totally decentralized and suburban it is, a series of disconnected outposts in several outer North London boroughs, and it’s just possible the various actions suggest what can, and possibly can’t, be done to politicize these places, so far from the metropolitan idea of protest as something which happens in highly symbolic central locations (Parliament Square, Whitehall, Millbank). The first occupation took place at Trent Park, the campus where the Philosophy Department was based, in one of those places where the ‘green belt’ instituted around London in the 1930s can be seen to not be entirely fictional. The advertisements for Middlesex courses at nearby tube stations are a literal facialization of the neoliberal student as a series of demands, alternately hedonistic and utilitarian, and always grimly conformist. Headed by ‘I want to be more employable’, it continues thus: ‘I want to be the best. I want to do my own thing. I want to excel. I want to go to the gym. I want to study business law. I want to see West End shows. I want business sponsorship.’ And with particular bathos: ‘I want to see what’s possible.’
For over a week, Trent Park became a ‘Transversal Space’, which is to say a Free University, with speeches and actions taking place inside the usual University spaces. The thing with Middlesex, and what made it so unlike occupations at SOAS or LSE, is that the place is already the model of the neoliberal university – totally dispersed, totally atomized, with no particular Traditions of Glorious Rebellion. If, as Mark Fisher argued