The View From the Train (28 page)

  
1
  However, in
Building Futures
, an analysis of the future of the construction industry produced by the UK's Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
(CABE) in July 2003, academics and professionals imagined five scenarios, in one of which Will Hughes of Reading University predicted that, by 2023, ‘technological advances will create an industry in which procurement of new buildings is fully automated and no role is left for architects', and that old buildings will be ‘quickly replaced by shiny new standardised products that can be maintained by a semi-skilled workforce'. Similar transformations were anticipated during the 1990s, but seem no nearer today.

  
2
  See, for instance, Philip Leather and Tanya Morrison,
The State of UK Housing
(Bristol: Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1997).

  
3
  Including business, retail and leisure parks, hypermarkets, shopping malls, distribution estates, container ports, prisons, hotels, airports, etc. Rem Koolhaas characterises these as ‘Junkspace', ‘the sum total of our current achievement; we have built more than did all previous generations put together'. Koolhaas probably spends a lot of time in airports: in much of the UK and ‘old Europe', Junkspace appears to be largely peripheral to older spaces.

  
4
  Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(London: Penguin, 1964), p. 201.

  
5
  The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for example.

  
6
  de Certeau,
Practice of Everyday Life
, pp. xxiii–xxiv.

  
7
  Adolf Loos, in his essay
Architecture
(1910) wrote: ‘The house has to please everyone, contrary to the work of art, which does not. The work of art is a private matter for the artist. The house is not. The work of art is brought into the world without there being a need for it. The house satisfies a requirement. The work of art is responsible to none; the house is responsible to everyone. The work of art wants to draw people out of their state of comfort. The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative. The work of art shows people new directions and thinks of the future. The house thinks of the present.' Transl. Wilfried Wang with Rosamund Diamond and Robert Godsill, in Wilfried Wang, Yehuda Safran with Mildred Budny, eds,
The Architecture of Adolf Loos
(London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), pp. 107–8.

  
8
  This is not so much a reference to Heidegger's ‘Poetically Man Dwells', etc., as to the dilemmas presented to child-rearing households of moderate means by some contemporary cities, especially London.

  
9
  At least in
the West, the global consumer economy's locations for production, distribution and consumption are typically suburban or ‘rural', while global finance is increasingly centralised in the City of London and similar ‘world cities'.

10
  See, for instance, Dudley Baines,
Migration in a Mature Economy
(Cambridge: CUP, 1985), pp. 1, 3.

11
  London's City and South London Railway, which became part of the Northern Line.

12
  The first network was in Richmond, Virginia, in 1888. In the UK, electric trams date mostly from the early 1900s.

13
  Such as, for instance, the Lumière company's
Panoramas pris du chemin de fer électrique
, photographed from the Liverpool Dock Railway by Alexandre Promio in 1897.

14
  For example, when the original Tate Gallery at Millbank opened in 1897, it had cost its patron, Sir Henry Tate, £105,000 to build. In a comparison based on retail prices, this is ‘equivalent' to about £6 million today; in a comparison based on average wages and salaries, to about £20 million. Tate's original gallery was only the first phase of the present gallery, about a fifth of its current area, but the recent refurbishment alone cost £30 million. In the early 1900s, a new three-bedroom house in a London suburb could be bought for about £300 – ‘equivalent' to about £18,000 (prices) or £60,000 (wages) – of which about £50 would have been the cost of the site. In 1914, only 10 per cent of homes were owner-occupied.

15
  A UK government-appointed task force headed by Sir John Egan, BAA chief executive, produced its report
Rethinking Construction
in July 1998, describing an industry that ‘produces poor profits, fails to invest, and treats its employees as a commodity to be hired and fired and given dirty, unsafe conditions to work in'. Construction was rated so poorly by the City that the stock market capitalisation of the entire quoted sector was only £12 billion – only 75 per cent of the (then) value of retailer Marks and Spencer.

16
  A week's wage for a bricklayer was just over £2 (40
s
7
d)
in 1914, £3.67 (73
s
5
d
) in 1924 –
British Labour Statistics, Historical Abstract 1886–1968
.

17
  Reprinted in Paul Hammond, ed.,
The Shadow and its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema
(London: British Film Institute, 1978), p. 29.

18
  Lefebvre identifies a ‘conceptual triad' of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces (‘the perceived—conceived—lived triad'). Spatial practice is ‘a close association, within perceived space, between daily
reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, “private” life and leisure)'. Representations of space are ‘conceptualised space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent – all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived'. Representational spaces are ‘space as directly
lived
through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users”, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who
describe
and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate.'
The Production of Space
, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 38–9. Lefebvre's book was first published in 1974, and was quoted in David Harvey's
The Condition of Postmodernity
, which appeared in 1990, and in which ‘representational spaces' is translated as ‘spaces of representation', and the three concepts are stated slightly differently (pp. 218–19).

19
  Lefebvre,
Production of Space
, pp. 189–90.

20
  Cinema, for example, conventionally represents city space with relatively low levels of traffic noise, if only so that the dialogue can be heard. The transformative effect of such changes in the actual aural environment can sometimes be noticed during road closures, political demonstrations, or other unusual circumstances.

21
  Kenneth Frampton,
Modern Architecture: A Critical History
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1980); both passages are quoted on p. 278.

22
  T. Jackson, N. Marks, J. Ralls and S. Stymne,
Sustainable Economic Welfare in the UK, 1950–1996
(London: NEF, 1997), p. 28.

23
  Or, as Stan Douglas writes: ‘That the stage for the global dominance of financial markets was abruptly set by the 1973 oil crisis – and fully dressed with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system shortly thereafter – is proof that, far from being a dead zone between the emancipatory utopias of the 1960s and the protectionist greed of the 1980s, the current distribution of power is the secret meaning of the 1970s.'
Journey into Fear
(London: Serpentine Gallery, 2002), p. 136.

24
  See, for instance, David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 39, 54.

25
  
If.…
was photographed by Miroslav Ondrícek.

  
1
  For more on the implications of electronic media for experience of moving images, see Laura Mulvey,
Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image
(London: Reaktion, 2005).

  
2
  By ‘film', I mean film footage in which architecture and landscape are visible, rather than particular films about architecture and landscape. After about 1920, such footage is perhaps more widely encountered in feature narratives, especially after 1945, when location cinematography began to become more common.

  
3
  
The City of the Future
, a research project (2002–05) based at the Royal College of Art, London. See
vads.ac.uk
.

  
4
  Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde', in Thomas Elsaesser, ed. (with Adam Barker),
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
(London: BFI, 1990), pp. 56–62.

  
5
  Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions', p. 57.

  
6
  See Tony Rayns, ‘Death at Work: Evolution and Entropy in Factory Films', in Michael O'Pray, ed.,
Andy Warhol Film Factory
(London: BFI, 1989), p. 164.

  
7
  Lefebvre,
The Production of Space
, p. 25.

  
8
  David Harvey,
The Condition of Postmodernity
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 266.

  
9
  Stephen Kern,
The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 5.

10
  John Berger, ‘The Moment of Cubism',
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1969), p. 6.

11
  Ibid., p. 5.

12
  According to Kern, 30 million emigrants left Europe between 1890 and 1914.
The Culture of Time and Space
, p. 220.

13
  Reyner Banham,
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
(London: Architectural Press, 1960), p. 14.

14
  Ibid., p. 67.

15
  Ibid., p. 317.

16
  Ibid., p. 311.

17
  Ibid., p. 66.

18
  Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 238.

19
  Ibid., p. 228.

20
  Average income
in employment increased about three times as much as indices of retail prices. The cost of housing has generally increased more than average income.

21
  See, for instance, Jackson et al.,
Sustainable Economic Welfare in the UK, 1950-1996
, who report that the UK's Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) peaked in 1976, and has since dropped by 25 per cent to the level of the 1950s, increases in GDP per head etc. having been offset by environmental decline, increased inequality and other factors. Similar patterns have been found in other advanced economies, notably the United States.

22
  See Kern,
Culture of Time and Space
, p. 157.

23
  Harvey,
Condition of Postmodernity
, p. 276; see also Camillo Sitte,
City Planning According to Artistic Principles
(London: Phaidon, 1965), first published in Vienna in 1889.

24
  Harvey,
Condition of Postmodernity
, p. 276.

25
  Ibid., p. 277.

26
  See, for instance, Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life', in
On Individuality and Social Forms
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. 324–9. The essay was first published in 1903.

27
  Among over fifty urban actuality films from the years 1895–1903, I have encountered only one in which cars appear:
Busy London – Traffic Passing in Front of the Bank of England and Mansion House
(Walturdaw, 1903), in which there are two cars, among a multitude of horse-drawn vehicles and pedestrians. In contrast, the surviving incomplete print of Cecil Hepworth's
City of Westminster
(1909) begins with a ninety-second moving-camera view photographed by Gaston Quiribet from a car that drives from the north end of Whitehall, up the east side of Trafalgar Square into St Martin's Lane. The traffic includes cars, horse buses, horse-drawn carts and vans, bicycles, hackney cabs, motor taxis, a steam lorry, and many people crossing the road between them. After the mid 1900s, such shots are rare.

  
1
  Stephan Oetterman,
The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium
(New York: Zone, 1997), pp. 314, 323, 325.

  
2
  Ibid., pp. 66, 323, 340.

  
3
  Charles Dickens, ‘The
American Panorama',
Examiner
, 16 December 1848, quoted in Oetterman,
Panorama
, p. 329. See also Bernard Comment,
The Panorama
(London: Reaktion, 1999), p. 63. Comment suggests that Banvard's original panorama could not have measured much more than 400 metres (though further scenes were added later).

  
4
  Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
The Railway Journey: The Industrialisation of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century
(Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986), p. 62.

  
5
  Oetterman,
Panorama
, p. 179; Comment,
Panorama
, p. 74. The exhibit was funded by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits.

  
6
  Stefan Zweig,
Letter from an Unknown Woman
, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Cassell, 1933), first published in 1922 as
Brief einer Unbekannten
.