An Unfinished Ruin in Savyon, Israel

A large unfinished house in Savyon, a wealthy suburb in the Gush-Dan area of Israel. Savyon was built in the 50s as a collection of medium sized houses in large gardens, and has since developed into a showcase similar to London's Bishops Avenue, where, through an influx of money from parts of the world where aesthetic signals are mixed with an unusually audacious and un-reflective eagerness, homes grow into caricatures of status, organised around the pomp of their facades, and the music-video kitsch of their pool-sides.

While development has usually led to either faux-palace fronts, with badly made colonnades, or to obese New Mexico style adobe cubes, looking like brochures for luxury tropical resorts, there is this strange pile, not quite fitting in, that has sat regally rotting in one of the main streets for about six years.

Looking like one of Saddam's smaller attempts at architecture, after a missile strike, it was apparently built by a Georgian (or Kazakh, or Russian...) tycoon who, suffering from a mix of paranoia, bad taste and delusions of greatness, demanded that it be built as solidly as a bunker, and -one guesses- as palatial as, well perhaps less palladio and more Naboo.

Having spent alot of money pouring all that concrete into all those complicated forms, which I imagine were to last forever, it turned out that the owner's dreams came up against the fact that he had over-built the area that was zoned for construction on the plot. After spending so much building it, and the structure being so thoroughly monolithic (bunker-like basements included), it proved beyond his finances to demolishes it, let alone start again, and so it sits there, slowly rotting, and I imagine being well used by teenagers and kids.

A combination of the Edifice Complex, planning law, cheekiness and bad taste here managed to produce a quite fascinating place that simultaneously has the romantic allure of the modern ruin, like all those unfinished Dom-ino frames scattering Greece's landscape, the exotic strangeness, and mixed language, of new luxury architecture in Central Asia, as well as the weighty trace of implied defence and aggression that its interior resemblance to a bunker produces.

11 Flourishes From February and March

^ Four concrete posts on Gloucester Avenue, Camden

^ Closing Mobile Phone shop on Oxford Street

^ Split pediment board, Wardour Street, Soho

^ Primark Palace, Oxford Street

^ Toaster, friend's house, Clapham Junction

^ Art-Deco painted steel columns, Picadilly Circus Station

^ Pergola terminating a facade, with a little rickety staircase for access, Tottenham Court Road

^ High-Pomo axis, Poland Street, Soho

^ Hair, Riflemaker Gallery, Beak Street, Soho

^ Bed, Hampton Court Palace, Surbiton, Surrey

^ Storage Room (with bacteria killing UV lights), China Town

Op-Art Architecture: The Victor Vasarely Foundation

Next to a business park, by a motorway, on the outskirts of Aix-En-Provence stands the somewhat dilapidated Victor Vasarely Foundation, a giant shed of a building surrounded by struggling lawns and a rather forlorn looking 'reflecting' pond that looks like a paddling pool from Pripyat.

Victor Vasarely, helped along by his origins in graphic design, had always believed in there being a natural relationship between Op-art and architecture. He managed some other experiments on that scale, like "Le Ciel, Le Mer, La Terre' in Monaco, but here, in his own foundation he set out to start exploring the relationship between Op-Art and Architectural Space. In the strong Provencal sunlight the facade is on first glance strangely flattened, but starts to alternately jump out and recede from you, depending on how long you look at its black or white elements. It is a subtle, tentative breaking down of form in space, via our optical perception, later directly picked up in more flamboyant, but entirely derivative fashion by Fernando Peixoto's Brazilian towers.

The plan of the building is a collection of Hexagons, the corners of which are cut off (seen below), an omission which acts as circulation, and links the spaces together. Because of the missing corners, when standing in one of the tall hexagonal rooms, you can always see through to several other rooms at the same time, and like colour-drift within an op-art painting, the large installations in the other rooms mingle at the edges of your vision with the colours and patterns directly in front of you, affecting one another and concentrating detail at the periphery. This overlaying turns spatial depth, and perspectival scale, into methods of enriching the experience of moving through the place into a chromatic kaleidoscope that shifts depending on what is closer, further away, at the periphery, or in the centre.

The division between the form of the space (the extruded hexagons), and the planes on which the works are placed (the surfaces defining the edges of the hexagons), acts as a 3 dimensional structure of relationships between the installations. The arrangement adds a scale of optical structure that functions similarly to the grids and radial organisations in Vasarely's individual compositions, but here with whole compositions taking on the roles normaly held by blocks of one or two colours. The dynamics of chromatic and optical movement in his paintings, which is brought about by the shifting of the eye across patterned and distorted 2 dimensional surfaces, is here being embedded within a broader spatial choreography that uses the roaming of the body, together with the wandering of the gaze, to turn his aptitude for coruscating effect into a more bodily, immersive experience.

The form of the space itself, however, always remains an agent of structure, always stays at the level of the unfilled, undistorded grid that lies behind the agents of effect, ordering and setting relations between what is within itself, but never quite taking part.

But there are great moments, like the one above, where there is a hint of what it might have been like if Vasarely had totaly broken out, with his optical distortions, from the two dimensional (transforming the body of the spaces themselves), and launched into a deeper experimentation into the relationship, often tense, and perhaps too tightly defined in the foundation building, between form, pattern and colour. There is an antinomy between the three, often extrematised when it comes to architecture, where they each seem to have worlds unto themselves, which seem irreconcilable, with clear internal logics that completely contradict one another. But occasionaly, when they come together, the most gorgeous things can happen. Perhaps Vasarely, like all the Op-artists, was trying to be too scientific about his work, and perhaps by the time his meticulous research reached the topic of form, there was no time left for the life-time's worth of painstaking analysis that he would have demanded for it from himself; and so what we are left with is a proto-Op-Art Architecture, a careful composition of dizzying 2dimensional planes, set off by the occasional sculpture, which hints at the fun that might have been; and everything together, architecture, paintings and all, falling apart, peeling away.

Although the building is not in the best of conditions, at least it is open, which it hadnt been for some time in the 1990s, following the 12 year presidency of the Foundation by Charles Debbasch, a French Technocrat who allowed it to fall in to disrepair whilst embezzling funds and stealing artworks, crimes which led to his firing, subsequent flight from France, and which eventually helped fund a coup in the Republic of Togo, in which he took part, and consequently now enjoys a senior government position in the West African state (perhaps he just cant stay away from strident patterns). It wasnt just him, but apparently also many members of the Vasarely progeny stole from the collection, one even being arrested on the job in a storage facility in Chicago, leading to court battles and a final decision that his grandson Pierre Vasarely take control of the estate, which is now being slowly (very slowly) rejuvenated.

Welcome To London

This great little piece of public ornament is now semi-permanently gracing the north-western entrance to Leicester Square.

Warning of the amorphous and shadowy presence of some sort of unspecific, generalised "criminiality", out to get whatever you consider to be valuable in the space between your flesh and your outermost pocket, the sign (one guesses) is supposed to increase the reach and efficiency of the law through public awareness and vigilance. But because it looks like it has been hastily left by the retreating side in a battle of which there are no traces, like an apologetic warning to initiate self-policing from the government of some occupying power being forced to withdraw, instead of instilling communal self-policing and confidence it is unintentionally pathetic.

It doesnt have the sinister gaze of the discrete observer that shrouds cctv cameras with their very particular aura of malignant control, and singular purpose; instead it has the rather sad aspect that comes from a sign which is attempting to do something as serious as control criminality, but is having to nonetheless balance this with the role of needing to welcome people to an area, to somehow positively represent that area, to efface itself at the same time as pronouncing itself, hence the "WELCOME TO LEICESTER SQUARE", then the dire warnings, put as neutraly as possible, like the traffic-jam signs on motorways that tell you to drive carefully when there is no information to relay, and finally the ambiguous "HAVE A SAFE NIGHT", not "HAVE A LOVELY NIGHT" or "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A SAFE NIGHT OR ELSE: ITS UP TO YOU!", but the rather sweetly confused median. One feels for the sign, it doesnt know what it is, it is pathetic, and Kawai, sweet.

I wonder whether it ever has other messages posted on it from different governmental depts or the GLA, perhaps like "Welcome to leicester square; the food served in some establishments here has been proven to be detrimental to your health; Order with caution; Have a healthy evening".

Because there is something so forlorn about the wheeled-in sign, with its little guardian sentry rails that allow it to conform to Health and Safety regs, and its confused task, I wonder if it could be brought to life and given its own sad, pleading personality, like a very British Marvin The Paranoid Android in another guise, or a more down-to-earth, london 2010 version of the Highway sign in LA Story that instead of helping out like a post-modern benevolent techno-god, here looks back at you from the works of man and offers up a confused and pitiful mirror, in LED and aluminium, for your own relationship to the city around you.

Eduardo Paolozzi Mosaics at Tottenham Court Road Tube Station

On the eve of Tottenham Court Road Tube Station's demise (it is being redeveloped into one of the Major Crossrail Stations), I have made this photo tour of the Mosaics that alot of its interior is covered with, designed by Eduardo Paolozzi's Munich studio in three phases in the 1980s. These mosaics have graced my journeys through this station for the past 10 years, and together with the mind-blowing tiling of the tunnels, has added an unintrusively jubilant, and suitably superficial edge to the dowdy patina and standard spaces of this otherwise unremarkable station.

Entrance from Tottenham Court Road

The inside of all that is left of the whole block on the south side of St Giles' Circus (going down to the ticket hall) that used to contain the Astoria, Metro and the Ghetto, as well as that staple of early saturday morning Doners and fish n' chips, Dionysus.

The entrance to the descent of the three escalators from the tiny, low ticket hall is framed by this double arcade of bright primary patterns, through which you enter the commute home as if going into some sort of flamboyant, underground basilica. 

The Central Line Mosaics, completed in 1982, are all candy-coloured exuberance, as if the mosaic artists had been weaving a tribal fabric for the kingdom of Soho and Bloomsbury above, pouncing out of the walls like banners in a parade. 

More After The Break...

Donuts, Baguettes and Nineties Pop Stars

A couple of signs from Soho. Firstly one that sports a message that I wouldnt envy any graphics to have to convey in our current organic-fair-trade-minded delirium. In fact its just next to the Third Space, the uber trendy gym attended by no less than Madonna, and around the corner from the wildly expensive Organic super market Fresh n Wild, but by virtue of being a few metres closer to the student-trip tourism of Picadilly Circus, it stands a fighting chance for customers against image dinosaurs like KFC, Garfunkels and Adam's Ribs. I however, even though I walk past it probably every other day, had never noticed it as I generaly switch off my observation skills as I pass down from Brewer Street into the maelstrom that is the Circus, and only ever turn them back on again either once in the tube station (a very beautiful one I might add), or have crossed over into Lower Regent Street, past Lillywhites.

So I had missed the unique combined selling point that is this fast food joint which peddles DONUTS & BAGUETTES. It is like a couple of friends sat down, looked at how many student groups would be flocking past the site everyday (it sat opposite what was London's largest budget hotel until it was demolished recently), and, pointing out to one another that most would be coming from either North America or Europe, thought to cover the two regoins with respectively pan-continental dough-products: donuts AND baguettes; win win. Sealed with a snazzy looking dough-like font on contrasting candy-coloured background, in front of a pattern of abstracted op-art dough balls, lit by neon, the message zings in mighty defiance to the vast luxury hotel and retail project going up across the road, in place of the grand old Regent Palace Hotel.

Secondly, just above Cafe Nero at the start of Hanway Place, on the north side of Oxford Street (also being mightily redeveloped), there is an office of some sorts that has decided to print out a larger-than-life sized cardboard cutout of Brian Harvey, of East 17 fame, at his skinniest, and place it just behind the bay window, so that he leers over Soho St across the road, glowing with a weird neon halo from behind, and lit occasionaly with strobe-like flashes from the buses driving in the road running alongside him. The office seems to be empty apart from him. Perhaps they left one last resident to stand in protest as yet another block gets requisitioned for demolition by Crossrail? Oh well, "Let It Rain".

Paris Cafe

A Boulangerie/Cafe called "Au Pain Bien Cuit", at 111 Boulevard Hausmann in the 8th. We had just left the Musee Jaquemart Andre, and this shop provided a perfect counterbalance to that museum's Second Empire grandeur.

Brilliant combination of blue-veined marble-like laminate, red brick, yellow paint, and a host of catering trolleys and oven trays scattered between and over every surface.

While also being full of pictures and mementos of the past, mostly featuring an apparently absent baker who I presume started the place, and who you can see in the middle of the photo below (which was sitting on the lower shelf of a trolley next to our table), recieving the First Prize in the "Prix De La Baguette Parisienne" in 1997.

The Kalandeberg Fountain

In a small square, Kalandeberg, in the old city centre of Ghent, Flanders, there is this fountain that I make a bee-line to whenever I get to visit that city. Surrounded by boutiques in what I presume are mostly death-masked buildings, faced by the outdoor seating of a Pain Quotidien, pressed to one side of the oblong lozenge that is the open space in which it sits, unassumingly silhouetted against the glow of a MaxMara outlet behind it, the fountain is surrounded by cracked concrete bollards, is grimy, quite small, and is obviously tilting and subsiding to one side since the water from its basin uniformly falls down into its lower catchment at one edge. Even the sound of its splashing is normally -during the day- lost under the romping screech of an accordian playing old neapolitan tunes for the benefit of passing shoppers.

Please go here for the full video as blogger cuts its width in half on this blog.

However for me it commands the square, and, along with George Minne's (unfortunately temporarily removed) fountain of the kneeling youths,

George Minne's Fountain of The Kneeling Youths

marks the two poles of that sophisticated assurance which saturates Ghent in its own unique atmosphere of apparently frozen composure; a composure not of elegant display, rather the opposite, of a very spare and restrained matter-of-factness, in which everything from its infrastructure to its history, its architecture and aesthetics has been somehow pragmatised, somehow ironed free of all contradiction and doubt before they have been implemented and installed (or renovated).

Everything is so confidently neat, and yet nothing feels forced, nothing artificial. It is a calibrated smoothness that seems to be balanced by, on the one hand, little un-problematic flourishes of sentimental exuberance and sensual delight, from the city's chocolates to the vivid ceramics on its town houses, and on the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by studied transgressions, by the precise and pointful constructs of the city's large art school, and the contents of its institutional art museums, which evocatively contravene and disturb the smooth trajectory of the rest of the city centre, perhaps therapeuticaly providing an outer edge for the bored to indulge themselves and their speculations in. Whilst Minne's fountain, with its idealised, sexualised, emaciated dream of suspended youth sits right at the heart of the city as its prime example of the second pole of Ghent's aesthetics, asking questions, demanding attention, and always deeply moving, the Kalandeberg fountain, resting in its little out-of-the-way square, is the period totem-pole icon of the city's little whimsical decorations, its tasty indulgences.

Never perfectly proportioned, the whole fountain is oddly balanced. But oddly balanced in an endearing way, like a house that has been designed to look cosey by resembling an old tumble-down farmouse, or to look like a building that has grown in an inexplicable, but happily picturesque fashion over time. It is a warm living room from the turn of the 19th Century compressed and piled up into an ornament for the city.

The column is too small, it is squat and inelegant; the basin and its feet are far too large and rise up too high; the urn is too high and spouts its water feebly, from four tiny spouts which can do nothing to stop the water being carried away by the wind. But the manner by which the elements have been joined together, by simple stacking, give them the unity of a still life, of a small collection, of a side table packed with objects placed on lace, and the materials with which they have been made, pink stone, alabaster, copper and sandstone, make them all look edible, delicious to look at as well as sweet.

And the sculpture on which the column rests is just as sacharine, with an adorable dog caught in a perpetual chase around the circumference of the fountain after a fowl, a goose, and a duck. It is a sculpture of a kind with the sort of watercolours that would hang in any number of living rooms depicting hunting scenes, views of forests, a day out in country pastures; and the ornaments on the urn, column, basin and base are also of the sort that would decorate any number of Edwardian objects in any amount of living rooms, with their heavy, unmistakeable forms and clear, direct symbolism.

It is not an object for contemplation, and can hardly be called a relevant object for the city today, and yet, like Proust's Madeleine, it seems to be a little portal into tastes that encompassed a style and way of living whose residues, like the remnants of Horta in Brussels, have mostly been flattened out in the current city, while their current equivalents -the median household's patch-up of ikea and retro bric-a-brac- lack a comparable physical representative.