6 minute read
PARKYN’S PIECES ‘Doing Extraordinary Things’; Manchester’s Symphony of Slots; Order Order! Security Blankets? Places of Invention; Sense of Scale
PARKYN’S PIECES
Neil Parkyn reflects on things various
RIGHT: Engineers ‘Doing Extraordinary Things’
Neil Parkyn is a retired architect and urban planner living in central France
A sign outside The Engineers’ Club in New York reminds us that so much of the world around us is shaped by this remarkable breed of men and women. The fulll citation alongside the entrance includes the apt phrase ‘ordinary men doing extraordinary things’, which seems spot on.
London is so full of their work, from Crossrail to the skeletons of the newest outburst of towers that the modesty of the engineers involved remains resfreshing. The highly complex jigsaw puzzle of the rebuild of Liverpool Street Station, for example, required enginnering and contracting skills of the highest order. Passing through the sunlit station concourse can bring a sense of exalation and splendour. My personal enthusiasm for the World of Engineers was probably nurtured long ago by the pages of the Meccano Magazine, where a brother kneeling in front of a Tower Crane model he has just completed was admired by his sister kneeling opposite.
So it’s time for just celebration of these achievements. Let’s see more articles, visits, explanations and related events so that the public at large can appreciate these major new works of London’s infrastructure. Getting them designed and built were challenges too often left unsung, yet they fully deserve the spotlight.
Manchester’s Symphony of Slots
A recent visit to this sleek and swishy city centre left the strong impressiion that almost all of its recent office and residental towers present facades composed of vertical slit windows. These are stacked, joined side-by- side, syncopated, clustered or scattered apparently at random. The eye strives for visual rhyme or reason but fails to make sense of the distribution. After a while, one abandons the search for visual order and thinks of the slots in a pianola roll or in ancient Hollerith punched cards. Adieu good old Functionalism, in which there could be a consistent logic in the fenestratiion. Here by contrast we get swept up into almost musical ryhthms that don’t add up to any tune. There are further combos on offer – double height slots, partly glazed panels, blanks and much else.
Perhaps it’s all a well meant attempt at ersatz excitement, but so much of it on so many neighbouring facades creates a sense of disorder and unease, not variety and animation. It’s seldom that you encounter such concentrated slotterry at large. Time to sip your early evening drink served in one of the numerous cafés and restaurants which rather neatly occupy the double height ground level corners of most towers. You won’t be able to tease out any discernable pattern nevertheless, but it’s an appealing exercise in company. But there’s no denying that it’s still a tease. Or is the pattern of slots and solids actually intended to convey an extraterestrial message, or does the sequence defy other would-be codebreakers?
Order Order!
All of us, at one time or another, have faced the admitedily trivial but pesky problem of how to arrange a handfull of individual, diferrently sized posters on a notice board. Where to begin, with so many options available? The traditionaliists among us may plump for the familiar ‘washing line,’ on which the tops of the notices are neatly aligned. Others will favour stacking them in vertical columns centred on the midpoints of all items. Those of an artistic bent may prefer to assemble compositions based on colour, graphic merit or even in terms of how important they regard the information thereupon. It can all become something of a minefield, with layouts transformed by deft redeployment of tacks.
Budding archeologists may try to explore the sequence of a Notice Board’s development from the remaining imprints of Scotch tape or PostIt notes. There may have been a burst of graphic activity as sport teams are formed, or with the flow of the academic year. There are,of course those favoured moments when the Notice Board becomes the static star, beloved of Hollywood directors, as students crowd and jostle each other for a peek at the exam results or staff promotions.. Even when most of this informatiion could be transmitted electronically, we would miss the seasonal splurge of posters,often decorating all available vertical surfaces, proof of vibrant activity and adventure.
Security Blankets?
Rulers, rubbers, stubby pencil holders, ancient protractors and the like, it’s no surprise that many an engineer, architect or designer retains these items as personal charms, signs of continuity or simply as souvenirs of a well loved project. Sample
window sections are effortlessly attractive in their own right, with mysterious nooks and crannies without any applied effort. There is certainly real pleasure in turning a chunky nut-andbolt in the hand that’s not avalilable in any artful fingerwork on the Ipad. Rotating a non-electric pencil sharpener requires just enough care and skill as to partially occupy one’s thoughts and allow others to float in. The grinding sound and the fall of shavings have an attrractive artisana. Old boxwood scales from the pre-metric age are perfect desk accessories.
Places of Invention
In the annals of invention and discovery there has always been space for unpreposessing locales from which Wonders have emerged. Think of Sir Alexander Fleming’s modest plaque on the facade of his laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington or the shabby huts of of the codebreakers. Crossing the Atlantic, California can boast Sacred Sights of Invention that began life as humble garages and car ports. Anything it seems to keep things cheap and simple, utilitarian and temporary. By starting modest, inexpensive and banal the innovator and his pals are placing themselves proudly in a world without pretention, status or prestige. No donor’s name outside but a stack of ideas within. As long as there can be room for the circular plaque in due course. But if the course of science does not run smooth after all, a Garage Sale of mysterious assemblies might lessen the pain.
Sense of Scale
Time was when the size of objects could be readily visualised by lining up the requisite number of London buses, but such comparative measures now seem as archaic as the fading pages of the Meccano Magazine. Today’s micromeasurements are seemingly impossible to visualise without recourse to such references as the thickness of a cigaarette paper. Undoubtedly a gain for science if a loss to mankind, perhaps as significant as Othe demise of Beyer Garret locomotives and the like. Which reminds me. Charles and Ray Eames, the endlessly and effortlessly inventive couple of American designers, once made a short film entitled The Power of Ten, in which their camera pans away from a square of grass progressively by multiples of ten until, conceptually at least they reach the outer edge of our glalaxy. It is a delightful and vivid presentation of relative distance, made before space travel was commonplace. Catch it if you can. n
LEFT: Manchester’s Symphony of Slots
BELOW: Notice boards give us ‘Order Order’
