Traversing Intersections of the Countryside

TRAVERSING INTERSECTIONS of the countryside

(Front Cover) Countryside around North Berwick, Scotland. 2009.

Cormac Lunn s1734275 MA (Hons) Architecture Architecture Dissertation (ARJA10002)

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“An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.”

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 99.

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CONTENTS

Abstract................................................................................................................ 6 Acknowledgements............................................................................................. 7 Preface................................................................................................................. 8 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 10 Part 1: Intersections

1. FROM INDUSTRIAL TO BANAL SUBLIME.............................. 16

2. THE CARTESIAN PICTURESQUE............................................. 24

3. BIGNESS AND THE AERIAL IMAGE........................................ 34

Part 2: Traversing

4. REFLECTIONS ON AN INTERSECTION................................... 44

Bibliography.......................................................................................................... 50 List of Illustractions.............................................................................................. 54 Appendix.............................................................................................................. 57

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ABSTRACT The scope of this dissertation revolves around the intersection between the countryside and the city. The aim of this dissertation is to interrogate this point of intersection by applying both landscape and urban theory to explain specific conditions. This topic was chosen in light of the recent pandemic which imparts a renewed urgency to question how we live in cities and the networks of support that we rely on from the countryside. My research is explorative in nature, employing a bricolage approach to create an authentic and rigorous interpretation of the countryside. Within the bricolage methodology, transdisciplinary theoretical thinking has been applied to formulate an understanding of a specific condition in both a rural and urban context. The theme that emerges from these points of intersection is an inversion of rural and urban conditions. The countryside is now a place of intensity, agitation and constant change – a place of ‘Delirium’. I arrived at the conclusion that theses spaces in the countryside, at the point of rural and urban intersection, are in fact an expansion of urban terrain. Rather than witnessing a singular urban form, ‘the city’, we are instead confronted by new urbanisation processes that bridge between the rural and urban conditions, operating in this intersection, creating diverse conditions and territorial transformations.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I cannot express enough thanks to my dissertation supervisor, Dr Chris French, for his extensive knowledge, support and guidance throughout the process of writing this dissertation. It has been a pleasure working with you and learning from you. Thank you Chris.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my family and friends who helped finalise this project.

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PREFACE This dissertation begins with an introduction to current exhibitions on the countryside that provide a contextualising framework within which I have located a collection of essays. This work is organised as a loose entity: its parts made from a series of discrete essays that are intended to be traversed. Each essay is assembled as a ‘field’ of text, acting as a container for a specific condition in the countryside. There is an overarching theme of intersections throughout these fields, and in connecting these topics, can we begin to understand the enormity countryside.

The essays that follow are structured in a similar way, beginning with an opening provocation by Koolhaas through which I critique his presentation of the countryside and formulate new theories. The first section, “Intersections”, is an assembly of conditions and case studies in the countryside that have been grounded to landscape and urban theory. The second section, “Traversing”, retraces these points of intersections and uses them as a base for observing an emerging pattern. In doing so, we can build up an overall picture.

The act of traversing is articulated by Bruno Latour in ‘Plan 11’ of Paris: Invisible City, which provides a short introduction to the idea of traversing, both theoretically and physically. Latour takes a series of journeys through the city that most tourists would never see. At the start of each journey, he sets the scene minutely around a real, named person and observes this person during part of their daily work routine. Plan 11 follows a small team from the Service Technique de la Documentation Foncière (or Ordnance Survey Department) who are tasked with digging out a street from the dense fabric of the old Paris. The street is so new that is does not exist on any existing map.

Instead, the team uses an old land use map and surveys the streets by “traversing”, by moving from “station” to “station”, pencilling in a cross on the map at each point.[1] The same instrument is used each time, a theodolite on its telescopic tripod, which measures the topography, or topometry.[2] They can use neither maps nor nameplates to navigate since those very things depend on the quality of their own work.

They’re going to rely on what they call “unalterable landmarks”, these little coloured crosses, half-erased by the weather.[3] They become so hard to find that the team photographically documents the journey every step of the way: a window, a porch, columns, the corner of a wall.

[1] [2] [3]

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Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, and Liz Carey-Libbrecht, Paris: Invisible City (France: Bruno Latour, 2006), 13.

Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, and Liz Carey-Libbrecht, Paris: Invisible City (France: Bruno Latour, 2006), 14.

Ibid.

These photographs begin to work on a theoretical level with the written text. They are pieces of material, and they depict material stuff. We see the hidden parts of Paris that Latour is describing. They make the invisible visible for us. While the text remains linear, moving from chapter to chapter, page to page, the images form a network. They entail moving and thinking laterally, and they themselves encapsulate the act of traversing.

This dissertation follows a similar rationale, the text forming consistent furrow or patches while the images begin to form interconnections, creating a visual field. Given the digital nature of this work, the text can be read as a 1-page container or a 2-page spread. It is recommended to read this writing as a spread that provides a horizontal terrain distributed with intensities of content.

Traverse verb 1. travel across or through.

2. move back and forth or sideways. noun 1. an act of traversing something.

2. a part of a structure that extends or is fixed across something.

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INTRODUCTION The countryside has been romanticised as long as there have been cities, perceived as having an innocent agrarian past, whereas cities, prospering from commerce, represent a technocentric future. Our growing concentration of learning in architecture is only concerned with urban centres, leaving a significantly larger section of the world to fall under neglect and lack of knowledge. Literature has framed the idea of the countryside from an urban perspective, mythologising it as an unchanging, idealised pastoral landscape, and reading it as basic rather than ultra-complex. This ideologically driven construct presents a fictional view of the countryside, one that cannot contend with the increasing demands of the city. Beneath this superficial veneer lies a fragile and contradictory reality of high-tech agriculture and industrial nostalgia, a place far more volatile than the most accelerated city.

Such ideas are being tested at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in its current exhibition, Countryside, the Future, organised by the Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas. Ever the polemicist, Koolhaas returns to the Guggenheim four decades after his first exhibition The Sparkling Metropolis to assemble a collection of all things non-urban.[1] He argues that architects have focused on the city to the point of myopia, missing the convulsive changes occurring in sparsely populated regions. The exhibition is a perfect means for communicating an area as vast as the countryside. It holds a variety of mixed media collected from a consortium of collaborators, all representing a diverse range of strategies.

As the exhibition unfolds up the six levels of the rotunda’s ramp, it addresses the changing role of the countryside over time. Each level has its own theme, comparing and contrasting episodes displaced in time, space, and culture. Rather than proposing design solutions, the exhibition raises questions, roughly a thousand on one of the walls in the introductory gallery alone. Countryside, the Future is an exploration of a future that is already here, hiding behind the back of the fridge, below the sink and under the bonnet. These neglected corners begin to reveal themselves when asked the right questions.

Coinciding with the opening of Countryside, the Future in February 2020 was another exhibition exploring the rural and urban intersection.

Taking the Country’s Side opened at the EPFL, Lausanne, one week later. The curator of the work, Sebastien Marot, worked with Koolhaas and his team on the Guggenheim exhibition before stepping down to curate a display on “the complex relationship between architecture and

[1]

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Rem Koolhaas et al., Countryside: a Report (Köln: TASCHEN, 2020), 17.

agriculture over the past 10,000 years”.[2] Taking the Country’s Side is both a retrospective and prospective reflection on the link between agriculture and architecture, and their growing disconnection since the industrial revolution. The exhibition offers ways out of the current metropolitan system through four potential scenarios, each questioning the growing divorce and estrangement of the two disciplines.

The pandemic shut down both exhibitions; however, the research, questions, and propositions put forward acted as the perfect catalyst for my investigation. The exhibitions were more thought-provoking rather than providing a set of clear-cut answers. Despite both displays being grouped into thematic sections, the collection does not allude to a clear summary narrative—the pointillist portrait results in a series of snapshots of the global countryside. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resulting picture is vague, inconclusive and incomplete.

The cases displayed in Countryside, the Future have a sociological, political and anthropological concern rather than an architectural one.

Koolhaas’ contribution is not definitive, but rather an additive waterfall of questions. It is here where I aim to ground these case studies and substantiate their validity through theoretical thinking in landscape and urbanism.

[2]

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Luke Studebaker, “The Countryside In Question,” Log, no. 49 (Summer 2020): 90

(1) Installation View of “Countryside, the Future”, 2020.

Photography by David Heald. @ Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Today, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic imparts a renewed urgency to question how we live in cities and the networks of support that we rely on from the countryside. There is an undeniable symbiosis between urbanisation and agricultural development, between the city and countryside, with food operating as the underlying spatial and material medium between the two. Food matters to architecture, since the underlying question of how we eat, is fundamental to how we dwell. It connects our two greatest sets of needs, society and nature. Industrialisation may have rendered the connection between urbanisation and agriculture, the city and countryside, all but invisible, but our reliance on the latter still remains. Our cities do not feed themselves, with most of our food coming from this modified landscape we call the countryside. It is this urban paradox that the city needs the countryside – and vice versa – that constitutes the countryside as an urban construct, an amalgamation of tendencies outside our periphery that exists at the cities command.

This dissertation aims not to divert the focus away from cities, but rather to explore this intersection of rural and urban, shifting the conversation through an epistemological approach. The inquiry is a synthetic study of conditions that span rural and urban areas, applying both landscape and urban theory as ways of thinking to explain specific conditions.

In a way, each chapter starts to become an examination of particular thinking in landscape.

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[Methodology] The methodological backbone of my research is explorative in nature, employing a bricolage approach to create an authentic and rigorous interpretation of the countryside. Within the bricolage methodology, transdisciplinary theoretical thinking has been applied to formulate an understanding of a specific condition in both a rural and urban context. The subject matter is explored through primary and secondary qualitative research methods which have been selected and utilised at different stages to describe, interpret and contextualise a mode of thinking in each chapter. These include an examination of precedent, exhibitions, semi-structured interviews, content analysis, literature analysis and historical analysis.

The interviews conducted have been transcribed however they do not feature in the main body of text. They are not intended to be representative or scientific as they do not hold enough weight on their own. They are intended to be definitive and representative accounts of a condition in the countryside. The interviews offer anecdotes opposed to fact, helping to ground a more refined research context. The interviews themselves are therefore not critical data; they are simply prompts to thinking. The three interviewees I’ve selected provide a cross-section of the countryside, from farmer to agricultural advisor, providing a gradation of conditions and perspectives. Clear conclusions are left to the main body of text; thus, these are simply presented as conversations.

This dissertation proceeds through four essays, each focusing on a particular thinking in landscape and urbanism. Much like these exhibitions, every essay has its own theme, and every theme has its own conclusion or starting point. By traversing these essays, one is able to understand an enormously dense subject. The first essay “From Industrial to Banal Sublime” investigates the intersection between man and nature, architecture and the landscape, through the theoretical framework of the sublime. The second essay “The Cartesian Picturesque” explores how the Cartesian rationalism of the city is being applied to the countryside, using the Koolhaas’ work in Delirious New York as a starting point. The third essay “Bigness and the Aerial View” explores the interior and exterior relationship of buildings and their context, alluding to the notion that Koolhaas’ ultimate manifestation of ‘Bigness’ does not reside in the city but in the countryside. Finally, these three essays are traversed in the concluding chapter “Reflections on an Intersection” which summarises the central arguments presented an establishes an overarching theme.

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PART 1 INTERSECTIONS

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1.

FROM INDUSTRIAL TO BANAL SUBLIME

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FROM INDUSTRIAL TO BANAL SUBLIME If there is an architecture of the countryside, this is not the same as an architecture of the city. Structures are utilitarian, data-driven, built for production, not consumption. Buildings are not scaled to the human body, but to the landscape, machinery, and food storage and supply chains. It is an architecture of function and of housing. As banal as this architecture might seem, Liam Young describes these structures as “the most significant architectural spaces in the world?”[1] They are the defining cultural construction of our age, their anti-architectural form serving as a stimulus for a new architectural typology.

Rem Koolhaas is similarly struck by the significance of this new rural architecture, or architecture which is ex-urban. In a text entitled ‘TRIC: Post-human Architecture’, published in the catalogue of the Countryside, the Future exhibition held in 2020, Koolhaas describes the industrial sheds and data farms of the Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre (TRIC), a series of large white containers located in Reno, Nevada, as “beautiful,” “new,” and, provocatively, “sublime,”.[2] Koolhaas could using the term casually, as a shorthand for great, magnificent, or beautiful, but behind the term—used incidentally or otherwise—is an implicit positioning of architecture in relation to landscape, and to the architecture of the machine, held by varying definitions of the sublime, of what we might call the natural (through Ruskin) and the industrial (through Gropius) sublime. Through these definitions of the sublime, both held by Koolhaas’ off-the-cuff remarks, how might the ‘significance’ of ex-urban architecture, to invoke Young, be re-assessed? What might such a re-assessment offer to understanding the relationships (existing and potential) between the architecture of the city and the countryside?

Discussions of the sublime frequently start with Longinus’ On the Sublime, written in the first century A.D, which dealt with issues of form and style in oratory, before jumping to early-eighteenth-century England, where a much broader aesthetic concept of the sublime is developed, most notably by Edmund Burke. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful became the dominant aesthetic statement on the subject. In Burke’s empirical approach, the sublime is associated with objects that are vast, massive, infinite, dark, and gloomy.[3] For Burke, the significance of the sublime lies in the philosophical framework of phenomenology, [1] [2] [3] (an

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Liam Young et al., Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the PostAnthropocene (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 8.

Liam Young et al., Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the PostAnthropocene (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 65.

Kate Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking Aesthetic of) Abstraction,” New Literary History, 1995, 172.

which foregrounds a key factor in aesthetics: the effect on the observer.[4] Experiencing a sublime object or moment in nature involves an immediate feeling of terror mixed with the delight of knowing that one is situated in a position of safety; the terrifying event occurs at a distance. The spectator is completely overwhelmed, “[t]he mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”[5] This view of the sublime instigated a decisive shift in aesthetic thinking, with the primary concern being the effect on the observer rather than the object itself. For architecture, Burke’s description offered a path through which it might achieve metaphysical importance, a way of attaining visceral and spiritual experiences. Thus, the natural world began to play a lesser role in the definition of the sublime, with the observer becoming central in defining the emotion as the mind projects its internal state on the world. [6] (2) An Avalanche in the Alps, a sublime landscape painting by Philip James De Loutherbourg, @Tate 1803.

Burke’s theories formed the point of departure for John Ruskin’s discussion of the sublime in Modern Painters. Although Ruskin disagrees with Burke’s physiological explanation of the sublime in the first volume of Modern Painters, an unused passage identified by George Landow intended for the third volume of the collection describes a form of the sublime determined by the size of the object in relation to the observer: “In order to produce these peculiar impressions of sublimity on the human mind, certain degrees of this material largeness are absolutely necessary. No beauty of design in architecture, or of [4] [5] [6] MIT

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Nesbitt, “The Sublime and Modern Architecture,” 180.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Thomas M’lean, 1792), 73.

David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: Press, 1994), 8.

form in mountains, will entirely take the place of what may be called “brute largeness.” That is to say, of the actual superiority in feet and inches, over the size of Humanity, our constant standard, the general truth being that . . . the greatest effect of sublimity will be produced by the largest truth which can be clearly manifested to us.”[7] Here Ruskin establishes sublimity from the relative size of man, “our constant standard.” His concern with the relationship of a vast object and the human observer introduces an element of subjectivity. The sublime is no longer the shadow of God’s work, but the reflected shadow of man, a feeling produced when man compares himself with something far more significant.[8] Thus, when Ruskin begins to set forth an aesthetic theory for architecture this always emphasises the effect on man.

Having established the subjective nature of the natural sublime, Ruskin proceeds to delineate ways in which architects can employ the power of the sublime in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, his most comprehensive commentary on the sublime. In the chapter ‘The Lamp of Power’, Ruskin sets out a series of stylistic principles that make clear the “elements of sublime architecture.”[9] To create a building marked by sublimity, the building “must have one visible bounding line from top to bottom, and from end to end” to achieve the desired effect.[10] If the continuity of the bounding line was to be broken with cornices and ledges the “length of that line…cannot be estimated.”[11] In stressing the importance of the building’s profile within the observer’s mind, Ruskin begins to assert an architecture of extension; sublime architectural objects must be vast and uniform. In addition to these uninterrupted horizontal and vertical lines, an architect in search of sublimity must also employ “breadth of surface” in the walls if they are to achieve the effect of “the flatness and sweep of great plains and broad seas.”[12] The materials used, Ruskin asserts, matter little, so long as the “the surface be wide, bold, and unbroken.”[13] The final criterion for sublimity is the presence of bright light and deep shadow, since “after size and weight, the Power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity (whether measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow.”[14] It is this view that leads Ruskin to advocate for the Gothic and its “method of [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

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George P. Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John Ruskin (Princeton University Pres, 2016), 207.

George P. Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John Ruskin (Princeton University Pres, 2016), 208.

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, 1989), 78.

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 75.

Ibid.

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 77.

Ibid.

Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 84.

decoration by shadow,” and for anything in art which creates a “broad, dark, and simple” effect.[15] These characterisations of sublimity framed the way in which the modern movement in the twentieth century adopted a particular aesthetic position. Walter Gropius points directly to John Ruskin as an influence on the Bauhaus, [16] and critics regard Ruskin (and William Morris) as having begun a shift in aesthetic paradigm which has the Bauhaus as its denouement. Reyner Banham, in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age for instance, asserts that “[t]he human chain of Pioneers of the Modern Movement . . . extends back from Gropius to William Morris, and beyond him to Ruskin.”[17] Ruskin’s aesthetic writings, somewhat counterintuitively, became critical to the gradual embrace of the machine aesthetic in architecture by connecting emotion in art and architecture through the theory of the sublime. [18] By focusing on extension, shadow, unbroken surfaces, and breadth over material or formal concerns, Ruskin provides a theoretical framework for an architecture removed from stylistic constraints.

Perhaps the most notable example of a modernist project embodying Ruskin’s conception of the architectural sublime is Gropius’ 1914 model factory in Cologne. The building’s size, from, and massing of shadow all embody the Ruskinian notion of architectural sublimity. Gropius himself stated he wanted his glasswork seen as something ethereal and otherworldly.[19] He describes the factory window as: “a continuous horizontal casement, subdivided by thin steel mullions, characteristic of the New Architecture. And as a direct result of the growing preponderance of voids over solids, glass is assuming an even greater structural importance. Its sparkling insubstantiality, and the way it seems to float between wall and wall imponderably as the air, adds a note of gaiety to our modern homes”.[20]

[15] [16] [17] [18]

[19] [20]

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Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 98.

Michael Siebenbrodt and Schobe Lutz, Bauhaus 1919-1933: WeimarDessau-Berlin (New York: Parkstone Press International, 2009), 14.

Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 12.

George P. Landow. “Ruskin’s Theories of the Sublime and Picturesque.” In Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 181-240.

Sridhar, Anirudh. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” Carlyle Studies Annual 32, no. 32 (2017): 174 Walter Gropius and P. Morton. Shand, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 29.

(3) Model Factory, Cologne Exhibition, 1914

Although Gropius rejects the gothic revival which Ruskin had agitated for, he still refers to materials in the manner of Ruskin’s writing to pacify reactionary arts and crafts groups and to make the notion of the machine aesthetic more palatable.

In this evolution of the machine aesthetic, a sublime concern for extent and bare functionalism overcomes an ornamentation steeped in philosophical significance, as the efficiency of the machine eclipsed human labour.[21] This presented the Bauhaus with a paradoxical problem since they regarded the machine as the supreme producer but insisted that the workers were it’s masters.[22] Gropius was adamant this paradox could exist, viewing the machine as a tool “to abolish the individual’s physical toil of providing himself with the necessities of existence so that hand and brain may be set free for some higher order of activity.”[23] The liberating effects of the machine rendered work no longer toilsome. Instead, it had become uncreative and nonlaborious, ridden of joy or “gaiety.” This is at odds with a key element of Ruskin’s invocation of sublimity and its effect on the observer. Here, the restrictions placed on the mind by the barbarism of the unthinking machine cannot set the mind “free for some higher order of activity,” as Ruskin intended. This unnecessary labour sets in motion a slow detrition of the body and abstraction of the mind.[24] The same can be said about the loss of ornamentation, which Ruskin believed was the “principle part of architecture”[25] and synonymous with the quality of life of the workers. For Ruskin, ornamentation was vital for workers since it became a force that animated them.[26] This was something the Modern Movement abhorred. Architectural thought between Ruskin and the Bauhaus can be characterised by this shift: from labour as life itself as an instigator of thinking, to labour as a means to an economic end.[27] Koolhaas invocation of the sublime on the one hand can be seen as a logical extension of Gropius’ development of Ruskin. The buildings of TRIC lack ornamentation, they replace human labour with machine labour, without providing any instigation to higher orders of activity, they present large, unbroken surfaces (there is no need for a portico to indicate an entrance, or a window to let in light if there are no occupants). Plain façades permit a reading of extension. And yet, Burke’s invocation of the sublime is perhaps more relevant for rethinking this new architecture of the countryside as “the most significant” of

[21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27]

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Sridhar. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” 157.

Sridhar. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” 162.

Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, 33.

Sridhar. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” 175.

John Ruskin, Lectures on Architecture and Painting: Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 (Project Gutenberg, 2007), 57.

Sridhar. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” 163.

Sridhar. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” 160.

contemporary architectural spaces. Returning to Burke, the questions of relative size of the observer and the vast object is complicated by these structures. In this post-human environment, it seems that Koolhaas is compounding Burke’s, Ruskin’s and Gropius’ ideas of the sublime. In Burke and Ruskin, the landscape was the source of the anarchic and mystifying, forces which produced a sense of vulnerability in the observer. Architecture is the space of refuge, from which we observe these forces. Koolhaas, in contrast, argues that the landscape is becoming recognisable to us; the extension of particular techniques of cultivation, of surveillance of measure and the urban environment.

(4) Satellite view of Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre, 2017.

In their place, the sheds are the unknowable thing, their scale, the lack of apertures and lack of semiotic cues make these at once expansive, and yet (in contrast to Ruskin) immeasurable, unknowable, in some senses terrifying. This is architecture at a scale that is as imposing as the mountains, the avalanche, a source of terror. It is a compounding of previous models of the sublime, however, incalculable awe is no longer cast across untamed nature, it is instead across these vast banal structures.

Having subjugated nature, the challenge now comes from the antagonist, from man’s knowledge and its instrumentalised form, technology. The infrastructures that condition and construct our world are unknown, rendered invisible through distance and expanse. They are central to the production of our urban environment – city machines that support contemporary life. As Young states, they are “our generation’s great library,”[28] both figuratively and literally providing a source of knowledge and a new thinking towards architecture, one that is filled with blank forms and white noise, devoid of human activity. They are the ultimate expression of the banal sublime.

[28]

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Liam Young et al., Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the PostAnthropocene (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 9.

2.

THE CARTESIAN PICTURESQUE

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THE CARTESIAN PICTURESQUE The street grid, an imposition and mathematical abstraction, hallmark of urban rationalism, defining element of Manhattan. The New York borough is an archipelago of architectural islands, an archetype of the Metropolitan condition, and a continuous place of reference for Rem Koolhaas in his work on the city. In Delirious New York, first published in 1978, Koolhaas investigates what he then called the “Culture of Congestion,” a new cultural paradigm promoting density, heterogeneity and vertical dynamism associated with the modern city and its horizontal grid.[1] He theorised that the grid’s two-dimensional restrictions would give way to three-dimensional freedoms and associated architectural expressions of Metropolitan life. In the decades that followed, Manhattan remained a stimulus and point of return for the Dutch architect. Koolhaas further develops his theories on the city in “Typical Plan”, a piece written in 1995 and published in S,M,L,XL, a mammoth compendium of OMA’s work undertaken since 1972. But in “Typical Plan,” as the buildings of Manhattan, Koolhaas’ narrative had changed. The text looks at the repetitive, relentless homogeneity of the twentieth-century Manhattan office building, whose layout had become progressively rarefied as a result of the evolution of financial capitalism.

A structural simplification was being applied to accommodate the endless fluctuations of the market and rearrangements of firms.

The spatial distribution of a building was reduced to an elementary architectural frame. Koolhaas calls it “zero-degree architecture,” an “architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity.”[2] Zero-degree architecture promised a new architectural future, an architecture without qualities, “an architecture of the rectangle.”[3] Returning to Manhattan to launch the Countryside, the Future exhibition, and to the Guggenheim no less, site of the original exhibition of OMA’s investigations into and foregrounding Delirious New York, Koolhaas pitches the countryside into the city. While Koolhaas declares this a shift in focus, in the re-treading of Manhattan’s familiar landscape as a site for an exhibition, and ascending Frank Lloyd Wright’s canonical ramp, to what extend is Koolhaas developing a new thinking? Is the Countryside a new zero-degree architecture? Another declaration of novelty that, in fact, is just another re-framing of the city?

[1] [2] [3]

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Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 125.

Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “Typical Plan,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), pp. 335-351, 335.

Rem Koolhaas, “Typical Plan,” in Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 338.

When Koolhaas switches his attention to the countryside, a similar methodological rationale to the city is applied. At the culmination of the exhibition, as Luke Studebaker observes, is an image of Koolhaas surveying a landscape, the Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre, or TRIC.[4] Koolhaas ascribes to TRIC the scale of a metropolis, referring to the white boxes as an incarnation of that “degree zero” architecture first seen in Manhattan,[5] the skyscrapers or “degree zero monuments” of Manhattan’s grid.[6] Urban thinking here is deployed in or against the countryside. Perhaps this is appropriate. TRIC is, after all, an extension of the capitalist logics of the city, home to Tesla, and Amazon, a countryside devoid of countryside. But this extension of an urban logic is, at once, problematic and, perhaps unsurprisingly, key to Countryside, the Future.

The idea of extending a single piece of urban logic over the entire world was first explored by two studio groups from Florence in the late 1960s: Archizoom and Superstudio. The Continuous Monument series (1969) produced by Superstudio focuses on the aspiration for [4] [5] [6]

27

Luke Studebaker, “The Countryside In Question,” Log, no. 49 (Summer 2020): 75.

Rem Koolhaas et al., Countryside: a Report (Köln: TASCHEN, 2020), 272.

Böck Ingrid and Rem Koolhaas, Six Canonical Projects: Essays on the History of Ideas (Berlin: Jovis, 2014), 75.

(5) The City of the Captive Globe, New York, 1972, project, watercolor, axonometric projection. © Rem Koolhaas

the control of the natural and the artificial world through a primordial and ideal order of elementary geometric shapes.[7] The project was not intended to be a social critique of the diverse metropolis nor a celebration like Delirious New York. It was a gridded monolith structure that spanned the natural landscape and asserted rational order upon it.

In the drawings dedicated to New York, the shape of the Continuous Monument adapts to its place, widening at the tip of Manhattan to accommodate the skyscrapers, coming to define what Superstudio called the New-New York, a metropolis removed from the chaos of the congestion of skyscrapers.[8] (6) Superstudio, Continuous Monument, 1969-70.

Photomontage: New-New York (Musée National d’Art Moderne, Center Georges Pompidou, Paris).

Andrea Branzi, the co-founder of Archizoom, also explores the extension of a rational urban landscape in No-Stop City (1969-1972), transforming the idea of architecture into a neutral structure by eliminating its classical rules.[9] It could be described in its own way as an exploration of a “degree zero” urbanisation, an urbanism without qualities.[10] Branzi’s work somehow seems truer to Koolhaas original idea in Delirious New York: the architecture is expressed as something free, released from urbanity by virtue of the rationality of the grid. Koolhaas’ new version ditches the grid and internalises rationality without a structuring framework.

[7]

[8]

[9] [10]

28

Beatrice Lampariello, “The «discorso per Immagini» of Superstudio: From Continuous Monument to Supersurface, 1968-1971.” Archistor, no. 5 (2016): 107.

Beatrice Lampariello, “The «discorso per Immagini» of Superstudio: From Continuous Monument to Supersurface, 1968-1971.” Archistor, no. 5 (2016): 123.

Burkhardt François, Andrea Branzi, and Cristina Morozzi, Andrea Branzi (Paris: Dis voir, 1997), 7.

Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City. Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal Sistem,” Domus 496 (March 1971): 49-55

What differs in Koolhaas’ and Branzi’s description is therefore the relationship of the architecture and its urban landscape. Koolhaas’ description of this landscape as a series of boxes set in a seemingly random arrangement within the landscape, describes an urbanism underpinned by economic rationality (relative land values, availability of space, the elimination of a workforce, and so on). Branzi’s version, although unbuilt, reveals structures set within an infinitely extended grid, interrupted only by the natural features of the landscape, peopled by mobile beings; a rational space with autonomous architectures. This suggests two forms of zero degree space: the non-figural, structured planning of Branzi, and the incidental registration of urban forces key to TRIC. The non-figural planning by Branzi is illustrated in his first drawings of No-Stop City. He uses typewriter keystrokes to pattern a piece of paper with a series of dots and crosses representing, respectively, a grid of a continuous space and structures that lie within.[11] Regardless of this simplicity, these drawings illustrated a landscape that could be extended infinitely and populated with homogenous elements. The utopian rhetoric Branzi describes and draws is something we are seeing in the countryside today. Our current form of urban life is demanding an organisation, abstraction and automation of vast territories in the countryside. The more the city extends its demands for comfort, capital and consumption, the more the countryside is becoming a hyper-organised field of production. To enable whimsicality in the city, Koolhaas, argues, the countryside has to become more orthogonal and Cartesian.

Retracing the origins of Cartesian space is something Countryside: a Report does in the chapter following ‘TRIC: Post human architecture’.

In ‘Descartes Was Here’, Clemens Driessen locates the root of what he terms ‘raw Cartesianism’ as having originated from the geometrical gardens of Honselerdijk Palace in Westland, near Rotterdam, a cultivated landscape of opulence and riotous diversity. It was here in this richly complex landscape that the French philosopher René Descartes (1596– 1650) experimented with garden automation and developed the idea of Cartesian space.[12] Descartes projected a universal coordinate system with x/y axes onto the countryside, creating a grid that organised space to optimise production. The key innovation of Descartes was not the grid itself, which had been around since antiquity, but the mathematical order it applied to understand and master nature.

[11]

[12]

29

Pablo Martínez Capdevila, “The Interior City. Infinity and Concavity in the No-Stop City (1970-1971),”Cuadernos De Proyectos Arquitectónicos, no. 4 (2013): 130-32.

Rem Koolhaas et al., Countryside: a Report (Köln: TASCHEN, 2020), 279.

The aim: “render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature.”

The means: “the invention of an infinity of devices that would enable one to enjoy trouble-free the fruits of the earth and all the goods found there.”[13] Viewing space through the lens of a grid produced an immensely fruitful reductionism that simplified the calculation of space.[14] The grid allowed for the embrace of geometrical complexities, with curved line being able to be described by algebra. Descartes used mathematical formulas to solve spatial problems with known and unknown variables.[15] His mathematical program became a way of describing the world, with things in space measured in length, width and height.

Cartesianism became associated with order, efficiency, automation, clarity and repetition. Land became an abstract resource to measure and rearrange at will, ordered to reflect a mechanical mode of thinking and governing space, plants and people. Thus, the countryside was being made more productive by rendering it Cartesian.

This infinite Cartesian space is not so distant from familiar fictionalised landscapes of the future. The opening scenes of Blade Runner 2049 pan across a landscape of solar farms and tessellated fields, a derelict artificial landscape, “dead and abandoned to the dust and wind.”[16] In most speculative fiction, the future resides in the city. Rural areas are conspicuously ignored, lost arcadia, falling into desolate ruin, and populated only by exiles of the city. This near future illustrates that the city’s fate is intimately tied to the countryside. These opening shots describe a post-human world, a condition that while not yet present to us is a contemporary reality.

As Clemes Driessen observes, the colossal new order Descartes imposed on the countryside is still present in Westland, now operating as a greenhouse megapolis in Rotterdam. The greenhouses are stitched into the landscape, filling the terrain between industry, suburbs and the city. Underneath this sea of illuminated glass roofs, farmers/technicians manage hydroponic systems to generate unparalleled yields using far fewer resources than soil-based methods.[17] Westland has become

[13]

[14] [15] [16] [17]

30

René Descartes and Donald A. Cress, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Pub., 1998), 35.

Rem Koolhaas et al., Countryside: a Report (Köln: TASCHEN, 2020), 274.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 274 Blade Runner 2049 (Sony pictures home entertainment, 2017), Screenplay.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 275.

a central point in the global production of vegetables and flowers, organised in rows upon rows of glass boxes.[18] This architectural transformation of the countryside will continue to accelerate as the urban population grows and places more demand on production. By 2050, the global population will be at 10 billion, up from today’s 7.8 billion.[19] The result will be a need for higher agricultural yields, using less energy, less water and less land. Westland offers a narrative of how architectural typologies will come to manifest the shifting relationship between food and urbanism, between countryside and cities.

(7) Blade Runner 2049 opening scene, 2017.

(8) How the Dutch Use Architecture to Feed the World, @ Tom Hegen

[18] [19]

31

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 275.

World Population Prospects (New York: United Nations, 2019), 5.

A similar tension is visible in businesses like Koppert Cress, a high-tech producer of micro-vegetables operating under the sea of greenhouses in Westland.[20] These spaces are the width and length of New York avenue blocks, with plants grown in gridded rows beneath light with all non-essential wavelengths removed, producing an eerie, pinkish hue.

In our urban obsession with whimsy, we have relegated these extreme conditions to ex-urban spaces; the result: an urban obsession with beige, and new type of banality. In the countryside there is no reason for beige. The Cartesian rationalism being applied has become the new platform for the picturesque.

(9) New Nature - A highly artificial environment to create the ideal organic specimen. @ Pieternel van Velden.

The picturesque was first advanced in the late 18 th century, in relation to notions of the sublime, as a response to Burke, and developed by Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. It emphasised beauty and visual delight opposed to Burkes traditional notion of the sublime which produced a sense of fear and exhilaration.[21] The picturesque technique of planning a sequential visual experience is exemplified by the gridded rows of plants and spatial relation of the structures in Westland. [22] This comes as no surprise given the early emphasis Descartes put on the visual experience between the rational form of mental perception, and that of the visible world. These qualities of the picturesque are described in depth by John Macarthur in The picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities, particularly in the chapter on ‘Picture’. A review

by Katja Grillner summarises the chapter on ‘Picture’ as follows:

[20]

[21] [22]

32

Michael Kimmelman, “Why Rem Koolhaas Brought a Tractor to the Guggenheim,” The New York Times (The New York Times, February 20, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/arts/design/remkoolhaas-guggenheim.html.

John Macarthur, The Picturesque Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 5.

John Macarthur, The Picturesque Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 18.

“The picture implied in picturesque is a view that comes to challenge received opinions… and takes a particular interest in the everyday and the mundane… this had a significant effect on the architectural profession, as a distinct interest in vernacular buildings develops, and ordinary housing becomes an architectural concern.”[23] The suggestion here is that we think of ‘Cartesianism’ as ‘ordinary’, as ‘mundane’ or ‘banal’ to use Koolhaas word. By re-framing the Cartesian through the picturesque, it becomes both a ‘challenge’ to ‘received opinions’ and at the same time, ‘ordinary’. It is an oxymoron which manifests as the Cartesian picturesque.

[23]

33

Katja Grillner, “The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities,” The Journal of Architecture 13, no. 5 (2008): pp. 669673, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360802453574, 669.

3.

BIGNESS AND THE AERIAL IMAGE

34

35

BIGNESS AND THE AERIAL IMAGE Bigness resides in the countryside. The sub-text of Bigness, as Koolhaas infamously declared, is ‘fuck context’.[1] To make sense of such a contextless architecture, alas, we need some context…

In a recent lecture at the Melbourne School of Architecture, Rem Koolhaas presented his manifesto for the countryside, revealing how it is a territory that is largely unknown and is rapidly changing. Koolhaas looks at a series of case studies distributed around the world, each with a unique situation but together produce a “mosaic coherence” that begins to build up a picture of the countryside.[2] In his lecture, Koolhaas acknowledges that we live in the digital age, allowing for a “ubiquity of observation” thanks to the satellite image. The resolution and analytical value of a digital picture from a satellite is quite literally rendering the countryside an increasingly “digital field”, allowing every square inch of the world to be knowable. It is a paradoxical situation: we do not go to the countryside anymore, yet we theoretically know more about it than we ever did.[3] The truly vertical angle of the satellite image flattens the landscape out, allowing Koolhaas to apply measure, read the context and identify pattern. It’s a tool Koolhaas uses throughout his lectures, his exhibition Countryside, the Future and the book Countryside: a Report to describe what he is seeing in the countryside.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the advent of aviation also ushered in a new mode of viewing the world. It marked a significant shift from the abstract yet specifically framed bird’s-eye views of the Renaissance tradition and offered an epistemic vantage point of the ground below. From the air, the frictional effects of distance, so overtly noticeable on the ground, are removed during flight.[4] The aerial view created a detachment from our immediate context, relieving us of a moral obligation toward the materiality of things and enabling us to see the topography ‘like a canvas’, a surface upon which we could project images of our own divination. It endowed humanity with a sense of omnipotence and encouraged their visions of rational control, planning and spatial order.

This ability to see and conceive large areas of land from the air was something that captivated modernist planners such as Le Corbusier [1] [2]

[3] [4]

36

Rem Koolhaas et al., “Bigness, or the problem of Large,” in S, M, L XL: (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 494-516, 502.

Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, “MTALKS - Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten on Countryside.” Melbourne School of Design, October 3, 2017. YouTube video, 59:57. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F4KGYWz0Ymw. Liam Young et al., Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the PostAnthropocene (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 65.

James M. Corner and Alex S. MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 22.

who, in 1935, celebrated the miracle of flight in his book Aircraft.

Aircraft, for Le Corbusier, combined this new vision with a material expression of mechanised production; a new optics coupled with a new aesthetics. In Aircraft, Le Corbusier presented this twofold contestation of pre-modern vision through a collection of photographs (another optical device) with short, dramatic captions both casting the aeroplane as the pinnacle of modern technological achievement and capturing the enthusiasm surrounding the aerial image. He examines how flight offered us a new angle and attitude towards the environment we inhabit, with a specific interest in the implications for urban planning.

In his preface, Le Corbusier writes: “to-day it is a question of the airplane eye, of the mind with which the Bird’s Eye View has endowed us; of that eye which now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be. And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming.”[5] (10) Curtiss A-12, All metal Attack Monoplane, Le Corbusier.

The aeroplane’s reorientation of the Albertian visual pyramid opened up a ‘new age’ of looking at the world from above.[6] The view from the aircraft was authoritative, unambiguous, and revealed the harsh reality of the city itself: “The airplane… scrutinises, acts quickly, sees quickly, does not get tired, and more, it gets to the heart of the cruel reality – with its eagle eye it penetrates the misery of towns.”[7]

[5] [6] [7]

37

Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: Studio Ltd., 1935), 5.

Mark Dorrian, Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 66.

Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: Studio Ltd., 1935), 12.

The vantage point it offered transformed the urbanist into a pathologist, allowing one to conquer and control space.[8] The aerial view had emerged as a powerful tool in the planning and shaping of urban areas.

(11) Map for all available flights worldwide. From Le Corbusiers My Work, 1960.

Le Corbusier was an early globe-trotter, travelling frequently, considering all issues in all locations at all speeds.[9] With this emergence of aerial vision and experience, Le Corbusier became one of the pioneers of city planning, introducing the idea of designing and building on a city scale.

The cities Le Corbusier’s proposed could be anywhere: free of history, tradition or context. The cities could be anywhere, because Le Corbusier was everywhere. He had no patience for environments that had grown up independently over time: “Cities, with their misery, must be torn down. They must be largely destroyed and fresh cities built.”[10] Despite the epistemic position the aerial view presented with its inhuman point of view allowing us to understand our own humanity; Le Corbusier choose to ignore context. He famously likened his architecture to the soap bubble: “A building is like a soap bubble... The outside is the result of an inside.”[11] In other words, free-standing buildings do not have to relate to their physical context. The interior layout, stemming from programmatic requirements or function, determines the form and not the other way round. This idea is explored in Le Corbusier’s Ferme Radieuse, a rigorously rational farm project in which the internal program of each building determines exterior organisation of the farm.

The arrangement is determined by the internal program of each building, resulting in an external reorganisation of the landscape.[12] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

38

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Pilote de Guerre, 72.

Beatriz Colomina, “The Endless Museum: Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe” Log, no. 15 (Winter 2009): 68.

Le Corbusier, Aircraft, 12.

Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: The Architectural Press, 1927), p. 167.

David Arredondo-Garrido, “References In Le Corbusier’s Reorganisation of Rural Habitat,” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 40, no. 2 (2016): pp. 99-109, https://doi.org/10.3846/20297 955.2016.1183531.

(12) Agrarian Reorginisation, Ferme Radieuse, Le Corbusier, 1938

A globe-trotting, much-travelled architect, concerned with the expanse of the city, the use of the aerial image as a tool for analysis and proposition, and an awareness of the relative independence of container and contained. The comparison might be facile, but Rem Koolhaas and Le Corbusier share many traits. In his study of architecture’s relationship to its urban environment, Koolhaas pitches a polemic against historical context and opposes the orthodoxy that texts concerned with ‘contextualism’—principally, but not exclusively, Rowe’s Collage City—had come to represent. In ‘Bigness’, Koolhaas directly attacks Contextualism as an ideology, stating that some buildings are so large that they exceed the visual field and thus have no context against which to be read; such buildings can only be understood from the air, in an aircraft.[13] For Koolhaas, the experience of the city is not one of a collage of buildings varying in instrumental or ideal qualities, but simply of one building and then another. Nevertheless, both these studies of architecture recognise the gestalt of figure and ground is a play of the visual field, between building and site, plan and elevation.

Koolhaas regularly eschews the concept of a building standing up as a figure on the site. Instead, he stands the whole territory up, making it the figure by mapping it and placing it on the page to face the reader on equal terms as the elevation.

This is perhaps most prominent in his recent investigation of the countryside. As previously mentioned, Koolhaas presents both aerial and satellite images in his lecture to apply measure and read the context. The aerial view becomes a way for Koolhaas to identify patterns of territories in the countryside (figures in the canvas). What Koolhaas notices is that the countryside, which used to be the territory where nature had a presence, is becoming a cauldron of spacing and [13]

39

Rem Koolhaas et al., “Bigness, or the problem of Large,” in S, M, L XL: (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 494-516, 501.

geometry (geo, meaning “earth,” and metry, “measure”).[14] In the city, the aerial view shows more clearly the spaces between structures, the morphology. In the countryside, all the program of these vast structures is internalised, producing a very different relationship between the building and its context.

The huge buildings in the countryside with which Koolhaas illustrates his talks, and which furnish his text in Countryside: a Report on TRIC, pay no attention to context, and could readily be interpreted as a manifestation of Koolhaas’ theory of ‘Bigness’. ‘Bigness’, it seems, has found its ultimate expression not in cities, but far from where most architects work, in the countryside. ‘Bigness’ is not about dimensions but rather the ‘parameters’ for which a given architecture stands.

Bigness is a consequence of technologies that allow the building to grow taller and thicker, resulting in the interior and exterior becoming detached.[15] Such buildings do not need a specific context to function because their program is internalised, allowing Bigness to be deployed all over the world, even outside cities. The ‘place’ where a building stands becomes obsolete. In perhaps his most polemic of the five theorems of Bigness, Koolhaas defines it as having jumped off the contextual plate. In his own words: “5. Together, all these breaks – with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics – imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue.

It exists; at most, it coexists.

Its subtext is fuck context.”[16] In its new ex-urban context, Bigness has become a call to recognise buildings as isolated objects unfettered and uninterested by external conditions – its ultimate embodiment residing in the architecture of the countryside.

With Bigness in the countryside, the exterior becomes internalised.

It is an inversion of Le Corbusier’s Ferme Radieuse which sought to reorganise the landscape according to programmatic, and therefore interior governed, concerns. The envelope of these buildings becomes a point of intersection, a place where interior and exterior are fliped.

The program is inverted, as is the countryside. Conceptually it opens up the space which was formely food production to a different type of spatialiy. Does it now belong to the city?

[14] [15] [16]

40

Corner and MacLean, Taking Measures across the American Landscape, 43.

Koolhaas, “Bigness, or the problem of Large,” 501.

Koolhaas, “Bigness, or the problem of Large,” 502.

41

PART 2 TRAVERSING

42

43

4.

REFLECTIONS ON AN INTERSECTION

44

45

REFLECTIONS ON AN INTERSECTION Through this investigation, the countryside emerges as a continually changing, highly productive landscape that services an urban condition – the city. This body of work emphasises the importance of countryside architecture, a place where “no one else was looking”, an “ignored realm”.[1] Each essay examines a point of intersection between rural and urban, the countryside and the city. The three points of intersection begin with an opening provocation through Koolhaas’ recent exhibition Countryside, the Future, which is then critiqued and reframed through landscape and urban theory. Appling transdisciplinary theoretical thinking at these points of intersection allows for new theories to manifest; these being the banal sublime, the Cartesian picturesque and the ultimate expression of Bigness. Traversing through these points of intersection and using each as a point of observation for the next begins to build up a network from this “pointillist”[2] portrait and reveals an emerging pattern.

So what do these intersections reveal? In the first essay, I survey the intersection of man and nature, architecture and the landscape, through the theoretical framework of the sublime. Traditionally the landscape has been a mysterious force that produces a sense of vulnerability for the observer. Architecture has always been readable and unambiguous, while the landscape remains unpredictable and terrifying. Koolhaas inverts this idea of the natural sublime, arguing the landscape is becoming recognised and the sheds at TRIC are the thing we don’t know because of their scale, the lack of apertures and lack of narrative.

This new type of architecture creates a new condition of the sublime in which we, as human beings, are redundant.[3] The architecture is, like 1970s New York, a kind of agitation, revelation and unfolding experiment. A new manifesto.

In the second essay, I explore how the urban rationale and the street grid of Manhattan are being enforced in the countryside. Through this grid, a structural simplification was applied to Manhattan’s skyscrapers, reducing them to an elementary architectural frame and stripping them of all qualities, something Koolhaas calls “zero-degree architecture”.[4] Likewise, Koolhaas ascribes to TRIC the scale of a metropolis and

[1] [2] [3]

[4]

46

Rem Koolhaas et al., Countryside: a Report (Köln: TASCHEN, 2020), 2.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 274.

Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, “MTALKS - Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten on Countryside.” Melbourne School of Design, October 3, 2017. YouTube video, 59:57. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=F4KGYWz0Ymw. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “Typical Plan,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1998), 335.

refers to these white containers as an incarnation of “degree zero” architecture. Although the exterior of these structures is ‘banal’, the interior program is rendered a hyper-organised field of production containing a multitude of activities. Koolhaas argues the countryside has to become more orthogonal and Cartesian to enable whimsicality in the city. In retracing the origins of Cartesian space through Descartes, I am able to expound and unpack the colossal new order of greenhouses at Westland. These spaces are the width and length of New York avenue blocks, with plants grown in gridded rows beneath light with all non-essential wavelengths removed, producing an eerie, pinkish hue.

The sequential visual experience exemplified by the spatial relation of the structures and gridded rows of plants creates a new intersection for two seemingly different theories: the cartesian and the picturesque.

By reframing the harsh cartesian conditions at Westland through the picturesque, the architecture becomes a ‘challenge’ to previous notions while at the same time remaining ‘ordinary’.[5] Hence, the Cartesian picturesque.

The final essay examines the interior and exterior relationship of architecture through the aerial image. Koolhaas uses such a truly vertical image to apply measure, read the context and identify a pattern. In the city, the aerial view shows the spaces between structures. However, in the countryside, the program of these vast structures is internalised, producing a very different relationship between the building and its context. Such a disregard for context as seen at TRIC is, in my opinion, the ultimate expression of Koolhaas’ theory of ‘Bigness’. ‘Bigness’ has found its ultimate expression not in cities, but the countryside. The envelope of these buildings becomes a point of intersection, a place where the interior and exterior are fliped. The program is inverted, as is the countryside.

The theme that emerges from these points of intersection is an inversion of rural and urban conditions. The countryside is now a place of intensity, agitation and constant change – a place of ‘Delirium’.[6] With this relocation of Delirium into the countryside, the city has become whimsical. Delirium now dwells in an inverted space, a countryside that resides inside. These moments of intense interior countryside are reminiscent of an urban condition in the Downtown Athletics Club, a skyscraper that Koolhaas characterises in Delirious New York.

With its ability to grow infinitely in the vertical dimension, the skyscraper was liberated from its immediate context and opened up to its internal programmatic logic. It was independent of the ground and its context, a condition I have ascribed to the countryside. This apotheosis of the [5]

[6]

47

Katja Grillner, “The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities,” The Journal of Architecture 13, no. 5 (2008): pp. 669673, https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360802453574, 669.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 13.

skyscraper hosts a program of ‘hyper-refined civilisation’ and contains a full spectrum of facilities associated with athletics.[7] The most extreme undertaking of this building is the interior golf course on the seventh floor, transporting an English landscape of hills and valleys into the interior.[8] Nature now resided inside the skyscraper as one of the infinite platforms that service and sustain the “Metropolitanites”.[9] It is the realisation of the “Theorem 1909” through a sequence of thirty-eight superimposed platforms containing a variety of programs connected only by lifts or escalators. Each skyscraper becomes a city-within-acity.[10] (13) Downtown Athletic Club, Interior golf course.

Koolhaas, ever the urbanite, notices a similar condition on his commute from his home in Amsterdam to his office in Rotterdam. His route cuts through the countryside and past a sea of large, uniform glass boxes that have “crept up to the side of the road”.[11] This vista of horticultural sprawl is Westland, a countryside-within-a-countryside.

This place of intersection could also be described through SolaMorales’ notion of the terrain vague. The French term terrain implies an urban quality rather than the English term land: thus, terrain can be read as an extension of an urban condition – the city. The term vague derives from the French or the Latin term vagus, which is by definition “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain.”[12] While the analogy of these terms presents an unclear meaning, the absence of a clear

[7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]

48

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 155.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 13.

Cynthia C. Davidson, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 118-123, 120.

definition permits ‘liberty’ of such a space.[13] Within urban theory the term terrain vague refers to conditions that occur within the fringes of urban and rural, acting as charged spaces that allow for creative freedom such as the greenhouses in Westland which stitched into the landscape, filling the terrain between industry, suburbs and the city.

Terrain vague can also be understood within the purview of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’, a theoretical construct that describes spaces that are ‘other’, outside and between symbols that define the urban space around them. These are conceived as “countersites” in which “all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”[14] They are sites that are incompatible with city life, places of intensity and transformation, mirroring and yet upsetting what is outside. Terrain vague challenges our rigid definition of what is urban and what is rural.

It is possible that theses spaces in the countryside, at the point of rural and urban intersection, are in fact an expansion of urban terrain.

While Koolhaas calls this expanse the “countryside”, a rudimentary term for “all territory not urban”[15], this inversion of space undermines this statement. It is possible that these spaces of intersection are in fact urban, an extension of the city.

Indeed, rather than witnessing a singular urban form, ‘the city’, we are instead confronted by new urbanisation processes that bridge between the rural and urban, operating in this intersection, creating diverse conditions and territorial transformations. The traditional vision of the city as a contained, universally replicable settlement now appears as no more than a quaint remnant. The city and countryside are inextricably linked by vast undefined territories that operate in and in-between Bigness.

The future of the countryside is deeply uncertain, given the changes taking place. At present, it largely remains a back of house for urban civilisation, a residual, a prosthesis of humanity. The overwhelming evidence gathered here illustrates a place of radical development yet devoid of human presence. The countryside must be rediscovered as a place to settle, a place to reanimate stagnant architecture. The architect’s ego is absent in these structures, their form and function based entirely on a reading of future cultural and urban conditions. The purity of intentions makes the future possibilities of this architecture truly fascinating and positions a previously “ignored realm” at the forefront of architectural debate.

[13] [14] [15]

49

Cynthia C. Davidson, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 118-123, 120.

Manuela Mariani and Patrick Barron, Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale (London: Routledge, 2014), 20.

Koolhaas, Countryside: a Report, 3.

TRAVERSING

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arredondo-Garrido, David. “References In Le Corbusier’s Reorganisation of Rural Habitat.” Journal of Architecture and Urbanism 40, no. 2 (2016): 99–109. https://doi.org/10.3846/202 97955.2016.1183531.

Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975.

Böck Ingrid, and Rem Koolhaas. Six Canonical Projects: Essays on the History of Ideas. Berlin: Jovis, 2014.

Branzi, Andrea. No-Stop City: Residential Parkings: Climatic Universal Sistem. Orléans: Editions Hyx, 2006.

Burkhardt François, Andrea Branzi, and Cristina Morozzi. Andrea Branzi. Paris: Dis voir, 1997.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Thomas M’lean, 1792.

Colomina, Beatriz. “The Endless Museum: Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe” Log (New York, N.Y. 2003), no. 15 (Winter 2009): 55-68.

Corbusier, Le. Aircraft. London: Studio Ltd., 1935.

Corbusier, Le. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 2014.

Corner, James M., and Alex S. MacLean. Taking Measures across the American Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Campbell, Joan. German Werkbund. Princeton University Pres, 2016.

Capdevila, Pablo Martínez. “The Interior City. Infinity and Concavity in the No-Stop City(1970-1971).” Cuadernos De Proyectos Arquitectónicos, no. 4 (2013): 130-32.

Davidson, Cynthia C. “Terrain Vague.” Essay in Anyplace, 118–23.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Descartes René, Donald A. Cress, and Descartes René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Indianapolis/ Cambridge: Hackett Pub., 1998.

Dorrian, Mark. Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation. London: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

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Fancher, Hampton, and Michael Green. Blade Runner 2049. Roma: Sony pictures home entertainment, 2017. Screenplay.

Grillner, Katja. “The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities.” The Journal of Architecture 13, no. 5 (2008): 669–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602360802453574.

Gropius, Walter, and P. Morton. Shand. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.

Kimmelman, Michael. “Why Rem Koolhaas Brought a Tractor to the Guggenheim.” The New York Times. The New York Times, February 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/ arts/design/rem-koolhaas-guggenheim.html.

Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, and Hans Werlemann.

“Bigness, or the problem of Large.” Essay in S, M, L XL: 494– 516. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998.

Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. “Typical Plan.” Essay in S, M, L, XL: 335–51. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998.

Koolhaas, Rem, Richard Armstrong, Troy Conrad Therrien, Julius Wiedemann, and Meike Niessen. Countryside: a Report. Köln: TASCHEN, 2020.

Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Monacelli Press, 1994.

Koolhaas, Rem, and David Gianotten. “MTALKS - Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten on Countryside.” Melbourne School of Design, October 3, 2017. YouTube video, 59:57. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=F4KGYWz0Ymw. Lampariello, Beatrice. “The «discorso per Immagini» of Superstudio: From Continuous Monument to Supersurface, 1968-1971.”

Archistor, no. 5 (2016): 106-37.

Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theory of John Ruskin.

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Latour, Bruno, Emilie Hermant, and Liz Carey-Libbrecht. Paris: Invisible City. France: Bruno Latour, 2006.

Macarthur, John. The Picturesque Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.

Mariani, Manuela, and Patrick Barron. Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale. London: Routledge, 2014.

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Muthesius, Hermann. Style-Architecture and Building-Art. Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994.

Nesbitt, Kate. “The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (an Aesthetic of) Abstraction.” New Literary History, 1995, 177–81.

Nye, David E. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

O’Donnell, Caroline. Niche Tactics. Routledge, 2015.

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Ruskin, John. Lectures on Architecture and Painting: Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853. Project Gutenberg, 2007.

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Saint-Exupéry Antoine de. Pilote De Guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

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Sridhar, Anirudh. “From Ruskin to the Automation.” Carlyle Studies Annual 32, no. 32 (2017): 155-78.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(Front Cover) Pictures of Countryside around Biei and Furano. Big Sushi, Little Fishes. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://bigsushilittlefishes.wordpress.com/tag/hokkaido/.

(1) Heald, David. Installation View of “Countryside, the Future”. Volume Project. Accessed December 17, 2020. http://volumeproject.org/countryside-awareness-campaign-rem-koolhaas/.

(2) De Loutherbourg, Philip James. An Avalanche in the Alps. British Library. Accessed December 16, 2020. https://www.bl.uk/ collection-items/an-avalanche-in-the-alps-a-sublime-landscapepainting-by-philip-james-de-loutherbourg.

(3) Model Factory - 1914 Cologne Exhibition. n.d. under1roofdesign. https://under1roofdesign.com/modernist_deutscher.html.

(4) Satellite View of Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre. The Avery Review.

Accessed December 17, 2020. Satellite view of Tahoe Reno Industrial Centre.

(5) Koolhaas, Rem, and Madelon Vriesendorp. The City of the Captive Globe Project, New York, New York, Axonometric. MoMA. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://www.moma.org/collection/ works/104696.

(6) Superstudio. New-New York. Blogger. Accessed December 16, 2020. http://arch122superstudio.blogspot.com/2012/06/continuous-monument-architectural-model_15.html.

(7) Deakins, Roger. Blade Runner 2049. Screenmusing. Accessed December 16, 2020. https://screenmusings.org/movie/blu-ray/ Blade-Runner-2049/pages/Blade-Runner-2049-0009.htm.

(8) Hegen, Tom. How the Dutch Use Architecture to Feed the World.

ArchDaily. Accessed December 17, 2020. https://www.archdaily.com/932301/how-the-dutch-use-architecture-to-feed-theworld/5e261b073312fd011100020e-how-the-dutch-use-architecture-to-feed-the-world-photo.

(9) Velden, Pietemel Van. New Nature. n.d. The Architect’s Newspaper. Accessed December 17, 2020.

(10) Le Corbusier, Curtiss A-12, All metal Attack Monoplane, Aircraft (London: Studio Ltd., 1935) 22.

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(11) Map of All Available Flights Worldwide. Design of the In/Human.

Accessed December 17, 2020. http://www.design-in-human. de/symposium/colomina.html.

(12) Corbusier, Le. Agrarian Reorganisation. Foundationlecorbusier.

Accessed December 17, 2020. http://fondationlecorbusier.fr/ corbuweb/morpheus.aspx?sysId=13&IrisObjectId=5725&sysLanguage=en-en&itemPos=154&itemSort=en-en_sort_ string1%20&itemCount=215&sysParentName=&sysParentId=65.

(13) Rem Koolhaas, Downtown Athletics Club, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994) 155.

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WORD COUNT: 9,464

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APPENDIX

The interviews that follow provide a cross-section of the farming community. They are a record of three conversations which prompted further thinking that has been explored throughout this dissertation.

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INTERVIEW 1: Mike OCCUPATION: Farmer LOCATION: Hull, England Interviewer 0:00 I’ll just start off with just giving you a quick overview. So as I’m doing my dissertation on the countryside, because there’s quite a cliche in architecture for focusing on the city, and given that more than half of us actually live in the city now. And by the time it gets to 2050, it’s going to be 70% of us live in the city, the countryside is becoming more neglected, it seems, in architectural terms, and isn’t getting the light shone on it. So in this void, there’s a lot of new architecture coming about more technology, like automate, like automated farming, and these big data centres that are just how everything that is serving the city is being placed in the countryside is what I’m trying to get at. So there’s a lot of change a lot of interest there. Which is why I’ve asked you guys, if I could give you an interview and just have a actual real life case study instead of all this literature that I’m reading. So I’ll start off with some, there’s just a few questions. What would you say the major changes have been since your dad’s generation of farming? Or since you came into the farming industry as the been any big milestones that you’ve seen a lot of change on your farm?

Mike 1:32 Yeah, everything’s got bigger.

Interviewer 1:34 Bigger?

Mike 1:35 All the machines are bigger. everything just goes a lot faster pace now I think then they did do.

Interviewer 1:43 Yeah and would you say there’s more reliance on like, the machinery to keep an advantage in the market? For instance if your neighbour’s farm got some new machinery would you feel that you’d have to get that as well, in order to keep up with the pace?

Mike 2:08 No, but it’s changed now. We’re basically have better bigger machinery and less men working for you. So there’s not as many people working for you, as it was 20 years ago. Employment has gone down.

Bryony 2:26 I would say the style of farming. So for Robin, Mike’s dad’s generation, when he was growing up, the farm was quite a typical farm in the area where it was mixed. So there was some cat of like, a variety of

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livestock, some pigs, you know, some arable land and he did that - it was mixed farming. Whereas now that there is much more of a focus to be profitable, you need to specialise, which tends to be despite what you see on Countryfile on the intensive farming practices. So rather than what your dad did which was, um, breed pigs, raised pigs, fatten them and sell them, we de-risked. We don’t go through the whole process, and we’re not involved in the husbandry, but we did what was called ‘bed and breakfast’, so just fatten the pig. So we were just a small part of the chain and in one way specialise and therefore do it on a bigger, more intensive scale. And yet, at the same time, farmers probably fall into two categories. Large scale in terms of land, and then smaller scale in terms of land. We fall in the smallest scale in terms of land and therefore have to diversify into of our non-conventional farming practices or businesses like the renewable energy side.

Interviewer 4:26 Yeah, I was going to bring that up. You’ve got an anaerobic digester, haven’t you?

Mike 4:35 Yeah.

Interviewer 4:38 Okay. And the thing that you specialise in is rearing the pigs up ready for slaughter. Like you don’t do the whole thing. How many chains are there then before they’d be ready for the supermarket?

Mike 4:52 Two. Two farms and then we finish, but we don’t have any pigs anymore.

We’ve just run out of pigs.

Interviewer 4:55 You’ve ran out of pigs!?

Mike 4:59 As of two weeks ago, aye two weeks ago, we went out with pigs.

Interviewer 5:04 And what was the reason for that?

Mike 5:06 Erm…they stink. And other things keep us busy, so we don’t need to do the pigs.

Bryony 5:24 So I guess it goes back again, to margins are tight for farming. So, um, we’re diversify into different things

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Interviewer 5:36 So, would you say you feel the market forces of the city? If you see there’s a demand for something, you’ll move towards it? You won’t just keep with the pigs for instance. Okay, for one, if you’re not a fan of them, if there they stink, but if they’re also are non-profitable, or you’re not seeing a big enough margin, you’ll shift quite quickly?

Mike 6:12 Yeah, there’s money in pigs. It’s just having the time of the day to do them. And with everything else we do, you do the pigs in the morning and you smell and then you go jump in the machine and go drive a digger for a customer for the day or go and prize the gravel up and the smell goes with you.

Bryony 6:31 So maybe, maybe ‘going out of cakes’ was more of a personal choice.

Interviewer 6:35 A lifestyle thing.

Bryony 6:37 Exactly. But generally speaking, most farmers have had to elect the part of the chain in terms of the breeding, rearing, slaughter, where they fit into. Maybe it is because cities are larger and the demand for the product, and the price that the consumer is willing to pay for that product means, you know, producing on mass and trying to compete with the likes of overseas produce as well. So you know, it always amazes me how many people in Britain buy, for example, Danish bacon, but Danish bacon is cheaper than British bacon, even though…

Interviewer 7:37 …it come from abroad.

Bryony 7:40 Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there’ll definitely impacts that, like Brexit, will have an effect on the farming community. But certainly the renewable side of the farm that we’ve had to diversify into. The AD plant produces electricity that is fed back into the grid plus, we also have solar.

Interviewer 8:17 Okay, that’s interesting. Just so I’m clear, you’ve got the plant higher, the anaerobic digester and the solar farm?

Mike 10:30 Yeah, so in terms of the renewable side, there’s the solar side and the anaerobic digester both of which produce electricity. For the AD plant, half the time methane gas comes off, which runs the engine and produces electricity, but a by-product is heat. So we do things with the

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heat as well like drying wood chip and for harvest we will be drying our own grain. It’s using a by-product in in a good way. And so then the kind of pure farming side is we still have our crops. So we’ve got the arable side as well.

Interviewer 11:29 Do you have the numbers for like, how many acres?

Mike 11:40 200. 200 acres of arable land.

Interviewer 11:47 Okay. And how much how of that is consumed by your solar farm?

Mike 11:52 A lot of that goes on top of the shed roofs. Produces 30 kilowatts. So it’s on the small side.

Interviewer 11:57 That would be considered small?

Mike 12:00 Yeh, that’s just servicing the needs of the farm essentially. So, it goes into the grid and then the AD plant is 150 kilowatts.

Interviewer 12:17 Okay. Um, okay. Just keeping with the numbers side of things, how many employees are there on the farm?

Mike 12:32 There’s me, my dad and my brother and then we just took a full-time digger driver on as well. So there’s 4 of us at the moment.

Interviewer 12:43 Which is not that much, really, for the amount, I guess, of land and the amount that you’re looking after? I guess what this is, showing is that there’s been a drop in the need for human labour really, because of the advanced machinery. And if you go back to your dad’s generation, or even before that, how many people were working roughly on the farm?

Mike 13:17 About 10. 10 or 12 during harvest.

Bryony 13:21 Yeah. So you’ve reduced by 50% at least. So we can talk about doing the pigs because literally, we’ve only stopped doing them in the past two weeks. But if you even think about how the pigs are fed, and

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watered, that was all done automated. So there was big feed bins, it would release the feed. So you would just get a lorry come in and fill up these big feed bins and then that’d be automated. Same with the water.

Whereas your dad’s generation, he would hand-do the troughs by hand.

So every day the pigs would be cleaned, mucked out and you would do that using like a forklift scrape bucket. Whereas again, previously, in terms of cleaning you didn’t have the same sorts of technology and power washing, as you say, automated. In that sense, less physically labour intensive.

Interviewer 14:42 Okay. And you briefly mentioned the harvest. Are you still operating on a seasonal basis? Have you managed to increase the amount of yield you get each year? Is it wheat that you’re harvesting?

Mike 15:11 Wheat, barley and ray.

Interviewer 15:12 Okay. And how many cuts of that would you get typically in the year?

Mike 15:21 Just once a year. Just one. But this year has been a really bad year because of the weather.

Bryony 15:32 But again, there’s advanced in terms of different species and variety of grain and seed. So in terms of resistance to disease, but also different times that you can plant. So you have you what you call your winter crops, where you’d be drilling them or planting them now. And then you have varieties, spring crops, where you plant them in the spring. And that can be an advantage, because if you have a really rubbish winter and can’t get your crops in, you have a second chance to still get a crop.

But you could only get one main crop like wheat and barley.

Bryony 16:26 Whereas you [referring to mike] also make silage. So cutting grass, and you get how many cuts?

Mike 16:30 4.

Bryony 16:32 You get 4 cuts of the grass to make silage each year.

Interviewer 16:39 And that would say that’s gone up as well? From when you started or dad’s generation.

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Mike 16:48 Yes. Everything’s got better now.

Interviewer 16:50 Right. Really just the last question now. Where would you see the farm going in like, the next 10 to 20 years? Have you got any big plans for it?

Or have you not thought that far ahead?

Mike 17:12 First of all, land. But George’s [mike’s son] era that’d be kind of seeing the money you’re gonna earn of it shall we say. To actually see the potential, you know. And just keep going, basically, just try and grow the plant hire side and basically try and employ a few more men and grow that side, kind of away from the farm. The farm itself won’t actually grow it any way. The AD plant can’t grow and evolve because the National Grid won’t allow us to put any more electricity into the grid.

We can’t grow the solar because our grid connection is full. So unless we buy more land which we might do in the next 10 years, the farm itself isn’t really going to change much anymore. It’s just growing new businesses on the side of the farm.

Bryony 18:15 But it is an it’s hard in terms of buying land. Like so many things in this world, scale can matter. So we have circa 200 acres. There are farmers out there who have between two and 5000 acres. So they’re, much bigger. And when smaller farms like ours come up for sale, the bigger farmers often just swallow them up because they can say, well, we’ll pay a premium for it just for the sake of having it all… and then they’re set up with all the kits. As they say Money makes money sometimes.

I think that renewables side is being exciting. And it’s trying something different. In our area, we’re the only ones with an AD plant.

Interviewer 19:48 Yeah very forward thinking. Out of interest have you been approached by anyone by who has come across and said, look, we’ll offer you this amount for the farm, or Mike 20:04 No. no. If I showed interest in selling it, there’d be lots of people. But I have no interest in selling.

Interviewer 20:14 Do you have quite a strong network with surrounding farms then?

Mike 20:23 Yeah, yeah, I do.

Interviewer 20:25 Because that might be interesting. Just actually getting in touch with

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them if it’s possible, just to build up a bigger picture. If you’ve got some contacts?

Mike 20:38 Yeah!

Interviewer 20:45 and how big are theirs? like yours? 200 acres?

Mike 20:51 No, we’re the smallest in the area. Well, as in, in our surrounding village, yeah, we’re the smallest in like a five, six-mile radius of here. All the farms are a lot, lot bigger than we are.

Bryony 21:18 I think what’s interesting is that Michael’s family’s original farmhouse and yard was swallowed up by the village back in the 70s. He was like a late teenager, early 20s. They offered another plot of land and said you can build a new farmhouse without, you know, any restrictions because we want to move the farm from out of being in the centre of the village so that we can then develop that for housing, and there was another old farmhouse where something similar happened, the Hudson’s. So then, there was some development, but it I’m just thinking in terms of the architectural side. In terms of services, you know, again, it mikes dad’s generation time, there was a train that ran through all the villages back into hull, which is our largest city, closest to us. And that’s gone, because it gets most people now they have cars. And that’s, that’s how they get about there is no we do have, we do have some buses, but you’re not certain that well, really, you are reliant on your own mode of transport being a car.

Interviewer 23:31 So that the link links between us strange though, but then there was rail links, and then they got rid of them.

Bryony 23:40 Yeah, that was a I forget what under which government that was, but that was quite a big thing across the UK. And they’re now starting to look at trying to put some of them back. But they all got ripped out.

Yeah, but they.

Interviewer 24:01 Alright. I think, I think I don’t think I’ve pretty much covered all the questions I’ve got here. So, we can pause there.

Bryony 24:13 We can always reflect on the questions and come back to you if we think of anything else. I hope it’s been helpful chatting to us.

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INTERVIEW 2: DEREK OCCUPATION: Senior Agricultural Consultant LOCATION: Inverness, Scotland Interviewer 0:00 So my dissertation is focusing on the countryside as I feel the city has become quite a cliche in architecture. As we get closer towards 2050, the UN has predicted about 70% of us are going to be living in cities. So that leaves the question is, what happens to the countryside? Is it going to become more neglected? What we’re seeing is an increase in more technological changes in the countryside to facilitate this growth in the city. So just posing the question of really what’s, what is happening out there? And so I guess we can start off by asking, what are the major changes you’ve seen in the farming industry?

Derek 1:28 Over the last five to 10 years?

Interviewer 1:30 Yeah, five to 10 or as well as far back as you can go. Andrew mentioned you worked on farms and then you’ve more into being an advisor. Would you be able to give us an insight into that?

Derek 1:51 Yeah, so I worked in farms up until I graduated and then I got this job. So I’ve been a farming consultant for 25 years now, working with farmers, crofters, landowners and basically looking at managing their lands and the economics of their business. Probably the most notable change is that machines got bigger and as a result, because machinery is bigger, they need to cover more acres without machine to make it economical. So there’s a lot of areas of Scotland where fence lines have been taken out, sometimes hedgerows will be taken out and even hard landscape features like dikes have been taken out. And that’s obviously that’s against the rules now, you’re not allowed to do that without permission. But as a result, for some large areas of Scotland, especially down the east coast and in arable areas, these 100-acre fields are not unusual now because of the size of machinery. So that’s an impact especially down in East Lothian, Fife, and Angus. That’s a huge impact on landscapes I would say.

Interviewer 4:55 With the increase in machinery are you seeing a big change in the ownership of this land? As in its moving from, you know, lots of small, family run farms into bigger commercial operations?

Derek 5:12 Yeah, there’s an element of that, I think, there’s a slight myth to say there’s big businesses coming into agriculture. There is an element of

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that. But what I would say is that there’s the strong businesses, family farms have got bigger and so… like I was brought up my 200-acre farm, and Stewart [cousin] was brought up in a 300-acre farm. Now, both farms are no longer viable as a family unit because you can’t live on that. You can’t make enough money for that. So, as a result, these 200 300-acre farms have been basically taken over by neighbours. They could be taken over into various ways. Sometimes they’ve been bought, and quite often the leased annually on a rental agreement or maybe a 5-10 year deal. Another option is they’re taken on through a contract farming agreement. So the farmer still owns the farm, but then use a contractor to farm it. So basically, for tax reasons, they’re still farming.

But in reality, the contract was farming the land.

Interviewer 6:08 So how many people would be running this 200-arce farm?

Derek 6:17 Possibly one… and now in an arable unit one person will easily run 1000 acres, no problem at all.

Interviewer 6:27 One person for 1000 acres? Wow. Derek 6:29 Yeah, it certainly depends on the enterprises involved. There’s a very straightforward. combinable, enterprise where one with the help with harvest and one with help with the sowing. But when you get into veggie and potatoes and all that stuff obviously the labour requirements shoot up dramatically.

Interviewer 6:45 And I guess that’s made easier by things being automated?

Derek 6:52 Yeh you’ve got these huge scale, kind of GPS, six row planters with one man operating. You’ve got this 6-meter sower where 1 man can sow easily 10 acres an hour so in a 10-12 hour day you’re looking at 100-120 acres on reasonable sized fields. And that’s why if you’ve got 100-acre fields is quite easy to get over the land. But if you’ve got a lot of 12-15 acre with a lot of overlaps, that’s when it becomes tricky. So that’s why in these marginally arable areas these small fields have probably stayed a lot of the time, because of the natural features, whether it’s woodlands or whether it’s habitats, whether it’s in rivers, ditches, whatever it is, they’ve remained in that kind of landscape as opposed to the east coast audible areas with less features. They’re the ones that have been modernised

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Interviewer 7:43 Okay, right. I see. I was speaking to a farmer down south who runs a 200-acre farm and he was saying he’s had to specialise, basically, because it’s quite small. It was just dealing with the rearing of pigs.

It doesn’t do the whole thing, like you know, breeding, rearing, slaughtering. It’s had to just focus on one thing. Would you say you’ve seen an increase in specialisation?

Derek 8:51 Yeah without a doubt that’s happened. Again, when me and Stewart were brought up our dads probably had quite a lot of different enterprises. So quite often, it’s a smaller operation, you know, some peas, some veg, some potatoes. And again, that just increased so the potato guys have gotten bigger and bigger, with big contracts with the likes of McCains. The whole industry is based around multinationals and supplying in these companies. The veg side of things is also controlled by very few players and as a result the growers have become very specialised. And as you know, the spec of these producers has become quite high and the specification windows has narrowed over the years, which means that that you’ve got to be on top of your game and have the size and scale to do that and have the ability to invest then, because when it comes to pack houses and processing units they’re obviously very expensive. You’ve also got to be close to an urban population to a certain extent, because for one, you’ve got to get employment in there to help you and also, you’ve got to get the distribution there to get products to the market. So that’s become a challenge as well. The other thing I think is quite important to note is the fact that 20 years ago, the margin round an urban population tend to become abandoned when it comes to agriculture. What I mean is there’s a timing in between fullscale agriculture and development of that land. Whether it is to put in factories, warehouses, wherever it is. So there’s a period that farmers do not invest in that land, because they know that it’s gonna be built on.

Where about are you from yourself?

Interviewer 10:46 I’m just north of Newcastle.

Derek 10:51 Ah okay, I’m sure you’ve seen areas round urban populations where the land has become slightly neglected and abandoned?

Interviewer 10:56 Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Derek 10:57 And that’s because it’s in hiatus between farmers investing in it and developers developing it. So what I think has happening is that the small units, like the one I’m looking right onto out the back of my house

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which was obviously in the past quite economical, are now struggling to make enough money. As a result, they’ve diversified into a farm shop and supply their own vegetables, their own meat and it’s quite a successful small-scale business now. Now that’s kind of driven by the fact that hopefully we’re buying more local and I think that’s gonna be accelerated because of COVID than it was in the past. But I think these small urban farms have the opportunity to supply the public with local produce to give them a better margin so they could survive in a small unit. So that stems the debate surrounding the take over by huge cubic farms, however, that’s only happening around urban areas I would say.

You need population to sell stuff to. You’ll see that around Edinburgh with small scale farm shops, coffee shops, play areas for kids along with the farm to supplement income. That’s all steamed from the land abandonments around urban populations.

Interviewer 12:27 and you’re saying these are small operations, how many acres are we talking about here?

Derek 12:32 Again, that’ll be in the two to 300 mark, ‘round about there. Or they’ve got passionate partner in the business. Now, that’s quite often a lady, quite often a wife. I’m not being sexist here, but it usually is, they’re the driving force. The male in the farming industry is quite traditional.

They want to farm as opposed to somebody coming in from outside of the industry. There’s another example up in Inverness where the wife bakes and has opened a little bakery. At the weekends, every Saturday and Sunday, it’s filled up and folk come and help themselves. So, it’s quite often driven by somebody that’s come into that business. Was a different view of things from what you’ve been looking at? Having been brought up on a farm, myself and Stewart, we’re quite focused on the fact that if somebody come in and see an opportunity for diversification it’s quite a good thing.

Interviewer 13:38 Yeah, absolutely. I happen to know a family down in Durham, and they run a small farm shop where the husband deals with the home-grown meats and the wife runs the cafe. So, they’ve made their farm much more appealing to the public. I guess the traditional views of farmers would be to keep the public off their, you know, scaring the sheep or the roaming the land. I don’t know what the rules are. Is it right to room on farming land up there?

Derek 14:38 I don’t know about England but in Scotland you could always go anywhere you wanted. That was never an issue at all in Scotland, you’ve always had the right to roam for 100 years in Scotland. As long as you’re not doing any damage to the farming operation, as in if there’s a field

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of barley you cannot just walk through the middle of barley, you’ve got to walk round the edge of it. But with grass fields you can just walk whatever you want.

Interviewer 15:01 Ah okay.

Derek 15:04 Another thing I was gonna say I was that up here in the Highlands is very different to the Lothians. What I will say is that because of the economics of hill farming and the land ownership, we’re seeing a lot of wealthy people coming into the Highlands of Scotland buying up estates. There’s one especially, Anders Poulsen, who is a Danish clothes tycoon and has bought, I don’t know, 10 or 12 states up here?

And he is very much in the rewilding zone. The first thing he does is gets rid of all the livestock and tends to take down fences and let’s go back to nature. Now, as a land manager, I find that quite difficult to take. For me personally I think you’ve got to manage this land for the benefit of wildlife and the public. These guys want to own the land and make sure nobody else wants to get to get onto it. So instead of maintaining paths, like we do in the farming industry, these guys just want to re-wild everything, so nobody gets access to anything. That’s the challenge we’ve got going ahead and it’s quite a polarised camp as you can imagine. There’s people like myself who want to manage the land and look after it to the benefit of the wildlife and public access. But there’s also the re-wilding which just lets things go to disrepair. There’s a farm down beside Aviemore, Mr. Paulson bought it. It was a beautiful grassland farm, took out all the fences, took down the steading, knocked down the house, and left it to go wild. To me, it’s a mess.

Interviewer 17:08 Yeah, that’s a really bizarre take on it. Not even with the future intention of you know, developing the land, like put property on it. Just literally leaving it for the wilderness.

Derek 17:23 Exactly. The wilderness is fine but because that landscape has been so changed by man over centuries you’ve got to manage it to go back to wilderness. You can’t just leave it to go back to wilderness.

Interviewer 17:34 Naturally.

Derek 17:35 Especially in this part of the woods, they’re very important these areas because the natural habitat is important and if left unmanaged, it can be detrimental.

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Interviewer 18:03 I see. I’d also quite like to get your thoughts on where the farming industry is going in the next 10 to 20 years? Are there any things that you can see starting to emerge, any patterns?

Derek 18:28 I think the public pass which has been funding agriculture, especially post-war, is going to be under pressure. What I will say I is that farming has very much been tied to production in the past. Over the last probably five to 10 years that’s shifted away, to environmental and public good.

So, I think as we get money from the public pass, which will continue to facilitate Scottish agriculture, that will change in that we have to do more for the public good and environmental benefits. I don’t think that’s anything to be scared of as an industry. I think it’s something that most farmers will pick up and run with. I think if the public pass subsidies completely disappear from Scottish agriculture there’ll be vast areas of land abandonment. Obviously, the good arable areas down the east coast will probably continue to get bigger and more business orientated. Multinationals might come in and take over. But the very marginally will end up being abandoned. If there’s no public money going in, then these areas are just totally uneconomic. As I mentioned at the start, machinery has got bigger and bigger and bigger over the years. I think we’ll start to see machinery getting littler and littler in the next few decades. The likes of Harper Adams over the last three to five years have grown a field of spring barley way all with robotics.

So there’s no actual human being going into that field to do anything.

Driverless tractors, GPS, all that technology is going to come in. It’s in at the moment but same as any technology, when it starts, it’s gonna quite unaffordable at the moment for wide scale use. There’s no doubt about it…these tractors are going to be on farm very, very soon, with no drivers on them. They’re going to be the smaller therefore cheaper to run, making large farming more economic in a smaller way, if you know what I mean? Well not need these six metre booms or 400 horsepower tractors, we can go back to the 120 horsepower tractors were using 40 years ago. I think that’s gonna have the biggest effect on the farming industry. It’ll also help with soil compaction and soil management. So that’s the two main changes I see coming for the next 10 years.

Interviewer 22:04 Just to pick up on what you were saying about no real human labour, you know, very few people on the farm, are there going to be changes in the infrastructure needed? If there’s not as many people on the farm, then what happens to the steading? I imagine there’s still the need for those buildings to store produce?

Derek 22:32 You’re still gonna have these buildings to store produce there’s no doubt about it. What I would say is there’ll be less demand for labour

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so as result, there’s less demand for housing in the farming industry.

The other thing is happening here, especially this year, is the demand for housing in the Highland has just rocketed up this last 12 months.

People are coming up from the south and are able to work at home and just buying a nice property in the middle of country. And that’s having an impact as well becomes it makes housing unaffordable to locals.

But potentially the output from these areas will increase because of the attention to detail. You know, farmers will be able to concentrate on smaller areas and make a better job with robotics than you can with a 400 horsepower, 36-meter sprayer.

Interviewer 23:49 Yeah that’s exactly what the reading that I’ve been doing is showing, you know, with these pixel farms managed by robots. The crops are literally analysed on the microscale to achieve the best yield. Speaking of yield, have you seen an increase in the number of cuts a farmer will get each year for, wheat, barley, that that kind of thing? It was still one or two?

Derek 24:29 Obviously, the barley and wheat, the combinable crops are all harvested once a year, but what I would say is that 2020 is has been the best yielding year ever. Nobody’s ever seen so much yield in crops. Now, that’s due to a combination of plant breeding and agronomy. So, there’s a huge yield this year. Massive. So that’s as positive Interviewer 24:56 and that’s across Scotland or across the UK? Derek 25:00 It is across Scotland, less so in England, because of the conditions they didn’t get their winter crops in at the back end down south. As a result of that there was a huge area of spring barley, but then it droughted.

It dried up down there, so they are yields are way, way down. But Scotland was a bumper year, a huge year. Very good. So I think that’s good, because obviously there’s pressure in the industry when it comes to price. Exports are also a huge grey cloud at the moment, but I think, yeah, technology and agronomy is a huge step forward.

Interviewer 25:47 Great. I think we’ve covered everything there. Thanks very much for taking the time to speak to me.

Derek 26:01 No no not at all. If there’s anything else you want to talk about you’ve got my number and email address. Just send me an email with any questions.

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INTERVIEW 3: LUCY OCCUPATION: Architect LOCATION: North Berwick, Scotland Interviewer 00:00 If you’ve got the time, it’s just a casual conversation really. My dissertation is focusing on the countryside and city relationship. In architecture, there’s a bit of a cliche around looking at the city and given that as we move towards 2050, it looks like about 70% of us are going to be living in cities, the other question we need to be asking is, what’s happening to the countryside? Is it going to become more neglected? What’s happening to the people living there? It’s basically being rendered a really overly productive area of land. So, from your point of view, if you’d like to start by going through the setup that you have on your farm.

Lucy 00:33 Well, I’ve recently come back to the farm. It’s a family farm, and I returned to the farm about 8-9 years ago. Prior to that, my dad ran the farm and then we overlapped for a number of years and then I took over from him. 20 years ago, he decided to get a contract farmer to farm the arable land for us. So, we have a contract in place with a contract farmer.

The main decision for this was my dad was getting older, it didn’t look like anybody in the family was going to take over from him anytime soon and machinery was getting bigger, more expensive and he would have to invest in the bigger machinery. It came to a point where he’d have to reinvest in bigger machinery or get a contract farmer to do the work on our land. He decided to go for the contract farmer and we’ve had a contract in for 20 years. It’s like a profit share, basically, he has all the machinery, all the labour, he brings that machinery and labour to the farm as and when required, and farms the arable land, basically.

Interviewer 02:07 How much land is that that you’ve got?

Lucy 02:10 We’ve got we’ve got about 500 acres and that includes some woodland.

We’ve got about 460 acres of arable land. Within that we we’ve always had poultry for egg production. We’ve had poultry on the farm for about 16 years and used to have battery cages but in 2011 they were banned in the EU. We decided to re-invest in the new welfare corn and cage system and that’s when I became more heavily involved in the farm and the poultry side of the business.

Interviewer 03:00 I see. So, given you also run an architecture practice, would you say you role on the farm is more managerial?

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Lucy 03:16 Yes, you’re right, I manage the contrast farmers at work and make joint decisions about how to manage the arable side of the farm. He is doing all the physical labour, he has all the machinery, he’s doing all of that.

We have meetings, and we discuss what crops to put in what field for next harvest. I keep an eye on all the bookkeeping, all the admin side of things. I’m also more involved in the poultry side of the business. I’ve got a management role but I do help out when people are on holiday, so I do cover for the two full time workers in the poultry shed.

Interviewer 04:10 As I understand there’s also a shop that you run as well?

Lucy 04:14 Yes, we have a small egg shop which is open four days a week, two hours a day, and we just sell eggs in it. One thought is that we maybe expand that shop and sell other products - more of a farm shop rather than just an egg shop. That’s one area we could diversify into. Tourism is possibly another area where we could diversify. On the farm we have 12 cottages that we rent out. They used to be for farm workers, but we don’t rent any of them to farm workers now. So that shifted about 30 years ago, the farm workers began to drift away from the farm cottages.

Interviewer 05:01 How many employees out of interest do you have working on the farm now?

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Lucy 05:05 We only have employees for the poultry side of the business, which are directly connected to the farm. We have two full time and three part time. One of those part time people looks after the mill as we make our own feed on the farm for the poultry. One of those part time guys is looking after mill and wheat and barley and getting all the raw materials into the farm. The other two guys are full time in the poultry shed and then we have weekend workers as well collecting eggs. Okay, three part time, two full time.

Interviewer 05:18 and that’s helped by a lot of things being automated?

Lucy 05:48 That’s right, the new system is highly automated. In the old battery cage system, we used to have about 28,000 hens and we now have 100,000 hens. We have fewer employees, yet we’ve nearly quadrupled in size in terms of egg production. We’ve probably halved the number of employees that we need due to the cost of those 100,000 hens. So highly automated, that’s what’s happened to our poultry side of the business. Everything’s on egg belt, there are motors that run to one end of the shed onto conveyors, bring them into the egg room, then they go through machine onto trays, the trays get stacked, and then the trays get stacked onto a pallet. Two full time guys can look after all of that and the hens.

Interviewer 06:55 That’s all very swift. You’re quite heavily invested in this production but in terms of linking up with grocery stores, if you’ve got 100,000 chickens where do all those eggs go?

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Lucy 07:12 Locally I’ve tried to supply local businesses and some businesses like hotels, bed and breakfast, they come to the shop and buy eggs.

I have tried to promote the shop in that sense and trying to get local businesses such as bed and breakfast, hotels, cafes, that side of things, to come to the shop and get eggs. The shop is a very small percentage of our production, its point 1% of our production that we sell in the shop to local people. The rest of it goes to a company called Glenrath, based in the borders, and they’re a packing station. They grade them, pack them and distribute them to the supermarket. They’re mainly involved with bigger supermarkets. So they’re not really involved with the small butcher shop, that kind of thing. There’s other packers who maybe supplied to the small butcher shop. I can’t really get into these small butcher shop, because Glenrath wants my eggs for the supermarket. I just try and promote our eggs to the to the small businesses that would be making breakfast for tourists.

Interviewer 08:50 Yes and I suppose they wouldn’t be as fussy about egg sizes or anything like that.

Lucy 08:55 In the shop we offer just two types of eggs. One is the large egg and other is more of a medium egg. We try and keep it simple and that suits the customers are coming to the shop. On the arable side of things like the potatoes, the contract farmer sets up contracts with Walkers Crisps or supermarket to supply them with potatoes that we produce on farm. He’ll sort out all the contracts with those types of packers and then deliver the potatoes, for example, to these companies and they then make them into crisp or pack them into bags for the supermarket.

Interviewer 09:56 Okay, nice. So, you’ve got these connections with big companies like walkers, and then supermarket chains wanting the eggs. Where do you see the farm going then? You’ve got this side of the farm shop, which kind of appeals to tourism but you’ve also got this other side of being quite productive and specialised. Which way do you see the farm going in the future?

Lucy 10:34 I think on smaller farms it’s very difficult to make a profit. We’re not too small, but we’re not one of the bigger farms. If we hadn’t invested in a contract farmer, I think we would have really struggled to keep up with the automation of agriculture. I think the automation of agriculture is only going to get more efficient, and it’s very intensive already. I do see a problem with how we’re treating the land. It’s not going to last much longer if we keep taking from the land and not putting enough back into it in terms of organic matter and letting it rest and letting

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it recover. We’re taking a lot of nutrition out of the soil quite rapidly with intensive farming. The soil is also getting compacted because the machinery is so big, but the machinery has to be big to make it cost efficient. It’s really difficult to see route away from intensive farming without support from the government to maybe switch to say, organic.

Also, if consumer demand changed from what it is now to organic then obviously farming would shift to more sustainable routes. In this country especially I think people want cheap food which is driven by the supermarkets. The supermarkets drive price down to the producer meaning we have to be highly efficient to make any kind of margin.

Interviewer 12:57 I mean they almost control the seasons don’t they. Now, because of automation and machinery, we’re able to increase our yield, and things like root vegetables and fruit are appearing in supermarkets all year round, there’s no seasons to it. It’s seems market driven forces are also being applied to the countryside.

Lucy 13:53 Hence why there’s lots of automation and big machinery. With those big machines, you need a lot of land make it cost efficient as well. For the contract farmer, he has these massive machines, which cost a lot of money, but he needs to learn to farm to make those machines work efficiently to get a return on his investment. You need a lot of land to work to be able to invest in these big machines. But interestingly, with COVID, it’s become a little bit more local in how people are shopping. They’re looking further afield than the supermarket which dominated for so long. People are beginning to get more interested in what’s produced locally. For example, people became more interested in buying locally at the egg shop. There are other farm shops in East Lothian, and I think there’s a lot more interest in them and where the produce comes from. Was it local? So COVID has helped people wake up to that idea of shopping local. But it is more expensive. That’s the downside of that kind of shopping - it’s really for the middle classes.

So, what about the lower income? Our eggs are targeting that lower income. In our type of system, we’re targeting the cheaper egg, the value egg, to get more local people coming to the shop and getting interested in the egg. There’s also a conflict of the animal’s welfare.

If people are aware of welfare, then they choose to shop differently.

But I think more people have become conscious of the environment, as well, during the lockdown and just aware of what is grown, where it’s growing, why it’s been grown. I don’t know if positive things will continue from that or people will default back to the supermarket shop.

It’s the consumer at the supermarket for catering for.

Interviewer 16:47 Absolutely. What surrounds your farm then? Are you in competition with anyone, other larger farms? Or is it all kind of a cluster of small

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arable areas?

Lucy 17:00 We’re not really in competition with other farms. We’re always sort of in competition with getting the best price. In a way we’re in competition with the supermarkets. There’s other neighbouring farms which are similar sizes to Ferrygate. They grow quite similar crops as well, so lots of cereals and potatoes. We used to have cattle, but various disease problems and paperwork made that a bit of a nightmare. So, a lot of livestock has left East Lothian. We used to have cattle, but we’ve had to get rid of them - it simplifies the process and the labour structure. You need more people to look after livestock than say, an arable field. So again, employment has reduced hugely over the last 50 year. 50 years ago the farm would be employing probably 20-25 people full time.

Interviewer 18:27 This was when your dad ran the farm?

Lucy 18:32 Yes, my dad was in charge. That’s when we have cattle, poultry, and the arable fields. We had about 20-25 full time staff and a lot of them would be living in the cottages. They’d all be local and all lived nearby, either in North Berwick or Direlton, and their life was on the farm. With automation and bigger machinery, we needed fewer people, because a bigger tractor could do more than, two smaller tractors, replacing the need for another person. So labour employment has decreased significantly. Employment has also aged as well. It’s difficult to get young people involved in agriculture and that’s going to be a problem further down the line. My staff are all over 60 apart from the weekend worker who are a bit younger. But yeah, the full-time guys are 60 and the part time guy who works in the mill, he’s actually over 70. He’s worked on the farm for 40 years. When these people begin to leave, there’s going to be a big gap of skills that aren’t passed on to the next generation. They’re going to take all that knowledge with them when they retire.

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Interviewer 20:22 Given how vastly different the farm is run from these 60-70 year old’s generation, it sounds like the role of a farmer is more akin to an engineer or mechanic, running all this automated machinery?

Lucy 20:37 Or a manager. Certainly, for me there’s a lot of management. Our neighbouring farmer still farms. He’s got all the equipment and he’s maybe in his 50s. He’s in the tractor every other day, depending on the season, and still does the bookkeeping and sending invoices. He’ll be working out what to spread on the land, what fertilisers to use, that kind of thing? Whereas in our set up we have a consultant. He’s an agronomist who would deal with all the calculations for the fertilisers and what to spread, when and where. There are still farmers, probably in their 50s, who still do all of that themselves. It’s the next generation after them that will probably use consultants for different aspects of farming because it’s becoming so specialised.

Interviewer 21:39 I guess it has to be just to keep pace with the city. To service the city the countryside to be rendered more and more efficient.

Lucy 21:50 Yes absolutely. Climate change is also coming into it, we’re getting a lot more rain, which obviously affects the crops. Flooding last year meant we had to replanting a lot of crops which has a knock-on effect to this year - the harvest wasn’t good. The rainfall in our area has definitely changed over the last 20 years because of climate change. That’s something we have to adapt to by either putting in more drainage in the short term, but long term, I’d like to think that we start to move away from fertilisers that are maybe damaging the water courses.

Agriculture has a relatively bad name in terms of what’s been put on the land in the past. We need to be smarter with how we farm in the future. There are new varieties of feed constantly evolving and so much research into GM crops especially and how it can be more efficient with less chemicals and fertilisers. That’s maybe the future to help climate change, and we’re using less of these chemicals on the land. The other the other area that I began to look into is vertical farming. I don’t know if you’ve touched on that?

Interviewer 25:14 Like hydroponics, that kind of thing?

Lucy 25:16 Yes hydroponics. Everything’s grown inside on trays, basically. They’re quite small plants at the moment but that could change to bigger plants, like tomatoes, but all grown under LED lights, everything’s highly controlled, the water supply is highly controlled, and you basically

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grow all year round. That’s how vertical farming works, you just stack everything on top of each other in layers.

Interviewer 25:42 You don’t drain the soil of it’s all its nutrients as well. It’s like a very nutrient rich solution.

Lucy 25:47 That’s right, it’s all through the water that you add the nutrients, and in doing so you use a lot less water. Again, it’s all about efficiency.

Interviewer 25:57 Yeah, there’s a lot of greenhouses cropping up in the Dutch landscape that use these hydroponic systems. They’re quite monumental in scale but completely out of our periphery as city dwellers.

Lucy 26:48 Exactly. We don’t understand where our food comes from and that gap is getting much greater. We need to educate people on where food comes from how it’s produced. There’s a gap there at the moment, and it’s getting bigger. Its complex isn’t it? Anyways, if you’ve got any more questions that you think of later, then don’t hesitate to just email and I’ll try and answer them as best I can.

Interviewer 27:46 Brilliant I will do. Thanks very much for taking the time to speak to me and best of luck with the farm.

Lucy 28:00 No problem at all. Keep in touch if you need anything else.

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