View from Above

Here are a couple of cool videos from the BBC 'Britain from Above' series. The first one shows the hidden infrastructural monoliths that our cities and towns kick into the edgelands around them so that no one needs to see them, they can be forgotten. This particular clip shows the vast warehouses required to supply our supermarkets with food. Without them our current way of living would come to a grinding halt, much like with power stations, sewage treatment plants etc. But people neglect to see the immense worth of these pieces of architecture/engineering/infrastructure and so they lie uncelebrated in their peripheral hinterlands. It would be exciting, I think, for a new kind of tourism to emerge where what makes a city tick is more important to the tourist gaze than the traditional cultural centers that have such limited focus and are generally stagnant, offering very little to the day to day life of the town, except potentially for tourism. Change the tourist gaze to the hidden infrastructure and the tourist can see something that contributes to the everyday workings of the place and are simultaneously fascinating. Imagine a series of postcards featuring electronic substations, reservoirs, railway goods yards, vast warehouse depots, motorway junctions, multi-storey car parks and sewage treatment plants...now that is an exciting imagery

It is something that Alan Berger talks about in 'Drosscapes':

Pg 28. "Publicity campaigns for cities always depict instituional buildings, cultural centres, airports, even sports stadia as the most valuable cultural attractions. A city's landscape assets - public parks, golf courses, water bodies, tree lined promenades, pedestrian malls, and conservation greenways - typically serve as the stage supporting these attractions. Missing are the unsightly but crucial transitional landscapes such as railroad yards, vacant lots, derelict buildings, contaminated fields, smoke stacks, industrial manufacturing and parking lots. Or, as stated above, these transitional landscapes are simply ignored."

There are of course a few wierdos, annoraks and nut-jobs that don't ignore these areas. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons are two such lunes. In their book "Edlelands" they describe what could perhaps be a prototype for a rambling tourism to spring up in and around the areas where vast warehouses and motorway junctions meet. They describe sewage treatment plants in such a way that they seem more communal and civic than traditional civic focal points such as town halls.

Pg 83. "Sewage Farms always suggest the scale of our settlements, collective bodily functions and a kind of community. All of us - bar the isolated devotees of the septic tank, or the commune's earthen pit users - are distantly connected and plumbed into these lagoons and basins...they are one of the easiest man-made constructions to identify from GoogleEarth...set in the hinterlands of every sizeable town on conurbation."

Of course it wasn't always so. Once on a time pumping stations, factories, warehouses etc. were located in he heart of the city and were proudly built in the richly ornamented decorative style of the Victorians. There were Cathedrals of engineering and infrastructure. I'm not going to bemoan that they have been cast out of the center of our towns, there is nothing inherently bad about sprawl and who wants to live next to a smoke stack? I'm not even going to cry out in despair that no longer are such things housed in high architecture but just plain sheds, or even just left all on show, like a body without its skin. Indeed Farley and Symmons point out that there utility and lack of high architecture almost make them more appealing:

Pg 84. "These are undesigned places in an aesthetic sense: nobody has worried over their clean lines, or suffered anything like a horror vacui."

Of course there are examples of recent infrastructure installments that are examples of high-architecture and have captured the imagination of the public - or at least the design publication reading public - buildings like John Lyall's Olympic Park pumping station. I just think its a shame that more people don't appreciate these utilities in their home towns, and a shame that people appreciate the one at the olympic park because of its 'cool' architecture rather than just for its important function. Having said that I don't blame John Lyall at all for what he has done because given a chance to make a cathedral out of a tool that essentially pumps shite and water around all day I would jump at it. ahh...glorious contradiction maybe, but the point remains the same, we should celebrate our hidden infrastructure...not because it is hidden but because of what it does and maybe a good way of doing that is to help it out of hiding a bit with some good architecture. Maybe the Victorians had it right after all.








The second video shows another amazing example of infrastructure that we take for granted but has had a massive impact on our port cities. The shipping container has had a huge impact on the urban prosperity of our traditional port towns and has instead created the vast container cities now operated by a handful of people and again left in the edgelands that they require to survive regardless of whether there are many people there or not. Modern cargo ships need large berths and a depth of water enough to accommodate their deep drafts. They don't need a large work force of dockers to load and unload the cargo. This crippled traditional docking areas in Britain such as London and Liverpool. Deyan Sudjic talks about this in "100 Mile City":


Pg 106. "...a whole string of other often obscure and inconspicuous developments, most of them to do with work and the way it is organised, have played an equally important role [as the car] in reshaping the city..."
Pg 96. "...When the first shipping contained, a steel box eight feet high by twenty feet long, was deployed on the run between Puerto Rico and the US in 1955, it was not on the face of it the most radical of technological innovations. But the success of the container doomed traditional enclosed docks the world over...When any manufacturer could load a container in the security of his own factory, and ship it around the world with nothing more than an occasional gantry crane to shift it from truck to boat and back again, the teeming gangs of dockers, organised to pack each bale and barrel into the hold, became redundant. Even the warehouses in which goods in transit used to be stored were now useless: steel boxes keep the rain out well enough by themselves. All that is needed for a modern container port is a deep water berth, enough empty space for platoons of fork lift trucks and giant traveling cranes to marshall boxes between ships and lorries. It is a formula that is efficient, but which hardly offers much scope in urbanistic terms."