It's a bizarre sensation, coming 'home' to somewhere that was where you thought you were going on your adventure to. We got to the airport, and suddenly the check-in queue was full of Spaniards. I understood some of what was being said around me for the first time in a month.
Coming back the contrast was so marked that I felt more relaxed and comfortable here in Madrid than I ever did before going to Turkey. Don't get me wrong, my Spanish hasn't magically advanced through disuse (quite the reverse), it's just I'm not so scared of using it now.
On the way home today I started to think about feeling lost, and endlessly displaced - wondering whether I fit even back home home (Sheffield, that is, at least for now. It's not even where I'm originally from). Geek that I am, I got stuck on the word displacement and started thinking very literally about the definition of the word in physics terms. Turns out I do remember some of it. Which is a relief given my profession.
Displacement is a vector, defined by both the distance travelled from a starting point and the direction. Velocity is then speed plus direction, the rate of change of displacement (the gradient on a graph of distance/time, or dx/dt) and acceleration the rate of change of velocity (the gradient on your velocity/time graph, or curvature of the distance/time one - dv/dt or d2x/dt2 respectively). Bouncing between three countries, I'm like a conker on a string - always going at ridiculous speed but still somehow constantly accelerating (if you don't follow, ask, and I'll draw you a picture) - so it's no wonder I'm feeling dizzy.
Nothing is certain, constant and normal. If you have no base to work from, what on earth do you say to anyone? You talk about travel, yourself, or the extremely abstract. Then everybody gets bored and wanders off. Must work on that.
Speaking of conkers - Autumn is upon us. The extreme summer heat has left Madrid and a comfortably temperate environment has supplanted it. As I crossed the park this evening it was starting to get dark and the clouds were bright pink against the fading blue, wispy bits stretching across the horizon like candy floss. I don't have a picture for you though, sorry.
Thursday, 13 September 2012
Wednesday, 29 August 2012
By the way...
In case anyone apart from me actually reads this blog, and is wondering about what happened with that chartership thing I mentioned in the first post, there is news.
I passed. Celebrated on a rooftop in Istanbul, as you do.
I passed. Celebrated on a rooftop in Istanbul, as you do.
That is all.
Shining in the darkness: Byzantine mosaics
As I begin to write, I’m listening to the call to prayer and
the sky is darkening over my little corner of Istanbul to reveal a full moon
hanging in the sky. This sound never
fails to evoke an incredible sense of otherness for me: it’s a stark reminder
of how far I am from home, repeated five times daily just in case I forgot for
a moment. Beautiful, though, as since I
got back to the apartment the reddish haze in the sky has gone and Levazim and
Ortaköy
are twinkling again. The best thing
about this flat is the view, and tonight for the first time I’m sitting with my
laptop on the little glazed terrace that capitalises on it.
The key thing about this place for me has got to be the
light, or more precisely the effect that minimal lighting can have. In the same way as the vistas across the
Bosphorus really become magical as the sun goes down, it’s the shadowy
interiors of the remaining fragments of Byzantium that really capture the
imagination.
I couldn’t write about Istanbul without talking about the
Aya Sofya (Hagia Sofia or Sancta Sophia in Greek and Latin respectively), which
has been dominating the skyline of Sultanahmet since the 6th
century. It’s widely considered to be
more impressive inside than out, and aside from the size this is very much down
to the mosaics…
I first learned about Byzantine art during A-levels and can
recall that a) it was one of the earliest forms of figurative art from the
Christian church, which had survived through the centuries because b) it was
all about the mosaics, and tiles don’t rot and flake like paintings in Roman
catacombs. I also recall that these
mosaics were special because of their tiny tesserae (tiles, to the layman)
which allowed incredible nuance of detail and shading, and abundant use of gold and lapis lazuli laid
not-quite-flat to catch and reflect the light and so give the images their lustre.
… so naturally I was excited to see the Aya Sofya. It was a big part of my agreeing to this
little easterly sojourn. On our first
free day I virtually dragged my long-suffering Spanish travelling companion to the door
and into the lengthy queue to get in.
Then we stepped inside and I felt, well, no more than moderately
impressed.
It grows on you though.
Once you move away from the worst of the tourist throng, it’s possible
to take in the atmosphere, reflect on just how old it is and begin to see the
traces of the original decorations that have variously been plastered or
painted over during the building’s life as a mosque. That’s when the impact comes: imagining the
place with shimmering mosaics on every surface in its heyday, just as Justinian
saw it. And now I find myself
considering stumping up the entrance fee again for a second visit….
 |
| Mosaic in the Upper Gallery |
 |
| Section of plaster removed to reveal mosaic |
The Constantinople of Constantine and his successors is hard
to find in modern Istanbul, save for the one show-stopping
church-turned-mosque-turned museum, so it’s necessary to leave Sultanahmet in
search of it. A reasonably well visited
alternative is the Chora, the 11th century church tucked away in the
west of the city. No period of
reflection is required here to feel its impact: the domes of the narthex glow,
with mosaics more stunning and complete than those of the Aya Sofya. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
The Chora is just within the Theodosian walls, which cut
across the peninsula and enclosed the city – preventing its conquest for a millennium
as the last vestiges of Imperial Rome withered and died quietly within the
empire’s eastern outpost. These walls
are in a terrible state of repair, and being well outside the tourist centre are
largely ignored. The shell of a fortress
forming part of the wall (Palace of the Sovereign or Tekfur Sarayı
in Turkish) prompted further recollections from school as I contemplated the
end of empire. This time it was Year 7 English
lessons, and learning the poem that most will find more familiar from the Watchmen
film character and his taste in interior design. Of all of Shelley’s lines, it’s only the
pedestal inscription and the sentiment that stick in my head:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair!”
Despair indeed, ye mighty, not at the greatness of
Ozymandias but for your being destined to share in the same fate. Somehow, for me, Rome is most poetic at its bitter
end.
(I also remember thinking that Bysshe is really a very
strange name)
Friday, 10 August 2012
Language acquisition at the beach
My Turkish vocabulary now extends to at least ten words. I can now ask for up to five of the following things:
Some weeks ago I found myself on a bus full of Spaniards heading for the coast. This was something of a step up in what I was expecting of myself in Madrid and represented a vague attempt at making some of my own friends in Spain. Spanish ones. I think through work I already know more Spanish people than your average guiri. English folk in Madrid generally tend to be language teachers, and consequently meet each other much more than locals, which impedes their own language learning and makes it harder for them to get to know locals... and so on. I think I can hope for better integration than that, even in the short time I'm around.
So today I'd like to talk about language, or my lack of it in recent months. With the level of Spanish I had on arrival I would never have dreamed of going on that trip - I couldn't even have read the website to find it.
Everyone who has put themselves through this process will be familiar with 'the silent phase' when you sit through evenings, lunches and meetings with a gradually improving idea of what's going on but without ever saying a word. You feel like an idiot. The Spanish phrase for someone who doesn't speak a language is simple, poetic and appropriate for this situation: estaba una chica sin palabras (I was a girl without words).
It's pretty hard going - my brother is convinced of the need to suffer to learn and language properly and I tend to concur to an extent. He's maybe a little bit extreme in his views on the matter but it is really very hard to see another way to get beyond the 'tourist' level where you can ask for things and manage basic interactions but can't really engage in proper conversation. It's perfectly possible to live for years in a country without achieving that higher level: people do and it's not always a problem. It's just not for me.
I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, when people are patient with me and I'm not distracted by actually being in Turkey, that is. In fits and starts and on comfortable ground I now have words. It is still exhausting (another feature of living in a country and attempting to learn the language - sheer blind fatigue) but getting better.
On the Monday after my weekend of speaking no English it was as though everything had just clicked into place. It was definitely worth going purely for the language practice, as I felt myself relaxing in conversation over breakfast.
The trip, incidentally, was my Spanish beach trip for the year - I found the group on the internet and liked the sound of a party on a catamaran as the sun set, followed by beach and hiking the next day. Here's a picture.
- Beer
- Water
- Tea
- Coffee
- Watermelon
Some weeks ago I found myself on a bus full of Spaniards heading for the coast. This was something of a step up in what I was expecting of myself in Madrid and represented a vague attempt at making some of my own friends in Spain. Spanish ones. I think through work I already know more Spanish people than your average guiri. English folk in Madrid generally tend to be language teachers, and consequently meet each other much more than locals, which impedes their own language learning and makes it harder for them to get to know locals... and so on. I think I can hope for better integration than that, even in the short time I'm around.
So today I'd like to talk about language, or my lack of it in recent months. With the level of Spanish I had on arrival I would never have dreamed of going on that trip - I couldn't even have read the website to find it.
Everyone who has put themselves through this process will be familiar with 'the silent phase' when you sit through evenings, lunches and meetings with a gradually improving idea of what's going on but without ever saying a word. You feel like an idiot. The Spanish phrase for someone who doesn't speak a language is simple, poetic and appropriate for this situation: estaba una chica sin palabras (I was a girl without words).
It's pretty hard going - my brother is convinced of the need to suffer to learn and language properly and I tend to concur to an extent. He's maybe a little bit extreme in his views on the matter but it is really very hard to see another way to get beyond the 'tourist' level where you can ask for things and manage basic interactions but can't really engage in proper conversation. It's perfectly possible to live for years in a country without achieving that higher level: people do and it's not always a problem. It's just not for me.
I feel like I am beginning to come out the other side now, when people are patient with me and I'm not distracted by actually being in Turkey, that is. In fits and starts and on comfortable ground I now have words. It is still exhausting (another feature of living in a country and attempting to learn the language - sheer blind fatigue) but getting better.
The trip, incidentally, was my Spanish beach trip for the year - I found the group on the internet and liked the sound of a party on a catamaran as the sun set, followed by beach and hiking the next day. Here's a picture.
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Engineer on tour: Go East
I wrote a blog post on a plane again. This is happening a lot (the being on a
plane, more than the writing on planes). Outside the window what I assumed at
the time of writing to be the lower reaches of the Carpathians marched northward
toward the Bulgarian border as I crossed towards the Bosphorus and the eastern
terminus of the Orient Express… going to Istanbul. It’s a mighty range of mountains and a bleak
and forbidding landscape, even the valleys between baked dry with their rivers
nothing more than tracks of dust. I’ve
lost count of my recent plane journeys but I still love a good window
seat. I’m considering the purchase of a
travel atlas for easier landscape identification.
The journey merits inclusion in the blog because it’s not
just another holiday. The vagaries of
construction project workload in the current environment and a global employer has
seen me sent East in search of gainful employment. Turkey is busy and buzzing so we’re joining
in. I know little about what to expect,
but will endeavour to record some of it in as articulate a fashion as I can
muster.
As previously though, with a long flight and a laptop I have
a chance to fill you in on something interesting I’ve recently seen. It’s been a long time coming but I’m finally
in a position to share my thoughts on the Herzog and Meuron talking piece that
is the CaixaForum building, just off the Golden Mile of Art in Madrid.
The building is sponsored by, fittingly, the CaixaForum, the
charitable arm of a large Spanish bank, and was commissioned as a venue for
art, music and general stuff considered good for society’s soul. Entrance is free, and a visit worthwhile just
for a trip up the first staircase which takes you – like a spaceship’s entrance
ramp – up from the centre of the floating building’s undercroft through sci-fi
brushed aluminium into the belly of the beast.
The building began life as a fairly unremarkable masonry
construction, a municipal substation if I remember correctly. The Swiss architects, or probably more likely
some of their employees from the company’s office in Madrid, kept just the
upper levels of this façade to raise up the building mass and open up a
semi-subterranean plaza (which one might call an undercroft, if so inclined)
beneath, complete with water feature and the aforementioned entrance
experience.
Above, the older building is topped with the architects’
favourite material of the last decade: COR-TEN (or pre-rusted metal to mortal
men), which blends tonally with the brickwork as well as adding height and a
nice bit of texture. I like it. It’s uncompromisingly modern without being
shiny, and inventively turns an old bit of structure to a new purpose rather
than tearing it down to start again.
There’s some great detail about the architecture on the CaixaForum
website.
Once inside, vertical circulation is up through one of the
concrete cores that provide support and stability to the structure, and the
smoothly undulating, high spec exposed concrete makes it feel like the inside
of a sculpture.
I was there to take a look, eventually, at the Piranesi
exhibition. I had a vague idea of his
work, and knew it featured buildings and cityscapes but really no knowledge of
who, when or where he’d been. I
certainly didn’t realise how inspiring I’d find the images, how redolent they’d
be of a sense of place or have any sense of the level of their finely etched
detail.
A mostly frustrated architect in the 18th
century, Piranesi apparently took refuge in the imagined places of his
etchings, drawing heavily from studies of Classical constructions for
landscapes of ruins, surreal vistas and fictional cartography. The exhibition
showed a broad range of his work, grouped more or less chronologically, and
standouts for me were one small print of tiny people racing along in between
the outsized tombs of the Via Appia and a modern video adaptation of his
Imaginary Prisons etchings made 3D. The
video is available online, set to a Bach Cello Suite, and although one might
argue the ethics of wilful manipulation of another, long dead, it doesn’t
detract from the originals but draws you back to take a second look at the
images so vividly brought to life. I am
also conceiving a real appreciation for the humble cello, I think.
The sheer enormity of the imagined edifices calls to mind every time I've stood in awe of an ancient (and they are always ancient if they have this impact - I think it's the contrast of scales between the fine details and the building size), monstrously large building and felt so very small.The work was about creativity, but also just about
skill. It’s a quality of
representation that really makes itself apparent in the work.
Just in case you were paying attention in the first
paragraph: yes I was wrong about the mountains, but also sort of right. The internet tells me that the mountains in
that particular part of northern Greece are called the Rhodopes, which go up to
meet the Balkan mountain range that covers much of Bulgaria and a bit of
Serbia. The Balkan mountains in turn do
almost meet the lowest part of the arc of mountain ranges that form the
Carpathians, but they’re cut off by the Danube.
So… I was right about what direction I was looking but not much else. Like I say, must get that atlas. There seem to be mountains in all sorts of
unexpected places, as I intend to discuss at a later date…
Friday, 27 July 2012
By way of explanation...
I've been asked to explain myself, and give some sort of justification for this whole blog-writing business, haphazard as it is. So I've identified three reasons, two of which do me no personal credit whatsoever:
1) Laziness - why write long emails to lots of different people when you can just put a link up on Facebook, or not even notify anyone and just expect people to check back periodically to see what you've been up to. It's this modern ailment of not being bothered to talk to anyone directly, which I'm wholeheartedly embracing. In my defence, the odds are that the internet in its facilitation of this cold, impersonal communication is really often replacing a sharing of information that never would have occurred, rather than better quality contact.
2) A near-pathological aversion to repetition - I hate repeating myself. It annoys me. I remember very clearly a stand-up fight with my mother many years ago over the vacuuming of my bedroom: the hoover hadn't been working very well so although I had done the chore the original goal had not really been fulfilled. Nevertheless I refused to do it again on the basis that I had done what I was asked once already and it was unreasonable to expect me to do it again. Ok, maybe there was an element of the laziness I just referred to, but for the most part I just couldn't stand the idea of doing the same thing again.
The same applies to conversation, and a consequence of this is that I tend to speak as though people know things that I have never bothered to tell them but did describe with thrilling vivacity to someone else. They then appear not to appreciate the development of that same theme. So instead of a) having to tell people all the same things about my time in Madrid or b) remember what interesting and different things I've described to each person it's easier just to write a load of stuff down and go from there.
A similar difficulty applies to forming any kind of routine or developing a proper hobby. It begins to feel boring, repetitive and claustrophobic and I find a new thing to obsess about for a bit. This is the reason I still can't play the guitar and will never succeed at any competitive sport.
3) Writing makes me think better. This is a good one, I think, and should help me get more out of this whole foreign travel and work business.
I did it in previous years, when I was travelling and it was a good way to pass the time, but I don't know if it was (a greater degree of) immaturity or the fact that it was entirely private that made me write this travel diary with even lower editorial standards and an even greater level of self-obsession, along with a lot of the assumptions of familiarity that I mentioned above.
A public forum, albeit one that few strangers will find or ever bother to read, focusses my ramblings to be a) more succinct and b) less about facile chronological diary entries and more about abstract things that I find interesting. Additionally, as I articulate my thoughts about things I find more then occurs to me. It also can act as a impetus to continue doing and seeing interesting things, so that I have something to write about.
In that spirit, it's 3.30pm on a Friday so I'm off out to sketch the city, maybe from a terrace, with a caña in hand. Next blog post is likely to be about Piranesi, engineering and drawing and how they all fit together. Or potentially Herzog and de Meuron's Caixa Forum building. Or mountains or the beach.
1) Laziness - why write long emails to lots of different people when you can just put a link up on Facebook, or not even notify anyone and just expect people to check back periodically to see what you've been up to. It's this modern ailment of not being bothered to talk to anyone directly, which I'm wholeheartedly embracing. In my defence, the odds are that the internet in its facilitation of this cold, impersonal communication is really often replacing a sharing of information that never would have occurred, rather than better quality contact.
2) A near-pathological aversion to repetition - I hate repeating myself. It annoys me. I remember very clearly a stand-up fight with my mother many years ago over the vacuuming of my bedroom: the hoover hadn't been working very well so although I had done the chore the original goal had not really been fulfilled. Nevertheless I refused to do it again on the basis that I had done what I was asked once already and it was unreasonable to expect me to do it again. Ok, maybe there was an element of the laziness I just referred to, but for the most part I just couldn't stand the idea of doing the same thing again.
The same applies to conversation, and a consequence of this is that I tend to speak as though people know things that I have never bothered to tell them but did describe with thrilling vivacity to someone else. They then appear not to appreciate the development of that same theme. So instead of a) having to tell people all the same things about my time in Madrid or b) remember what interesting and different things I've described to each person it's easier just to write a load of stuff down and go from there.
A similar difficulty applies to forming any kind of routine or developing a proper hobby. It begins to feel boring, repetitive and claustrophobic and I find a new thing to obsess about for a bit. This is the reason I still can't play the guitar and will never succeed at any competitive sport.
3) Writing makes me think better. This is a good one, I think, and should help me get more out of this whole foreign travel and work business.
I did it in previous years, when I was travelling and it was a good way to pass the time, but I don't know if it was (a greater degree of) immaturity or the fact that it was entirely private that made me write this travel diary with even lower editorial standards and an even greater level of self-obsession, along with a lot of the assumptions of familiarity that I mentioned above.
A public forum, albeit one that few strangers will find or ever bother to read, focusses my ramblings to be a) more succinct and b) less about facile chronological diary entries and more about abstract things that I find interesting. Additionally, as I articulate my thoughts about things I find more then occurs to me. It also can act as a impetus to continue doing and seeing interesting things, so that I have something to write about.
In that spirit, it's 3.30pm on a Friday so I'm off out to sketch the city, maybe from a terrace, with a caña in hand. Next blog post is likely to be about Piranesi, engineering and drawing and how they all fit together. Or potentially Herzog and de Meuron's Caixa Forum building. Or mountains or the beach.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Less of an icon - terrace life in Madrid
One of the things I've been enjoying on the few occasions I've managed to sit down and write this blog is the way I start remembering things. Specifically in articulating what I think about buildings and the city I find myself remembering some of that dearly purchased knowledge that came from four years of architectural study.
A big thing, love it or hate it, in architecture is the concept of the 'iconic' building. That big, shiny white elephant on the corner that people will travel miles to visit and everyone stops to photograph but that has real meaning to no-one at all because they don't live or work there. It's not a part of (almost) anyone's daily existence.
Cities fall over themselves to embrace the Guggenheim effect, while architects chase that big competition win. Architecture students try to conjure hypothetical landmarks on the street corners of provincial towns, unfettered by either cash flow or gravity but well versed in what makes an 'Icon'. Engineers are complicit, too, when we award prizes to buildings that we see little merit in beyond the fact that they are bigger and more expensive than the next.
The elegant little bits of design that sit silent but efficient in the corners of buildings (their very invisibility testament, often, to their ingenuity) are attributed no more praise than the shanty communities that develop unplanned yet seem to function on a basis of community engagement and shared ownership, albeit in the informal market. These need to be explained and promoted by their creators, as well as watched for and appreciated by building users. The architectural press, to their credit, has a nice line in appreciation of fine detail (the Detail section of the AJ, particularly, springs to mind as an example) while engineering journals can often veer wildly between incredibly broad-brush and uninformative or offputtingly dry and inaccessible.
As an aside, my brother and I both recently read a great book called Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, which deals at length with the effective informal administrative arrangements of shanty town communities and the potential of developing world in general. Different parts of the book, which explores a wide range of topics all running along the lines of 'How do we save the planet?', seem to have relevance to conversations on a regular basis, so we keep referring back to it. I still harbour some doubts about some of Brand's comments about building without regulation or design in some of these (extremely seismic) areas of the world. Professional building designers may in the eyes of many be entirely superfluous but there is a critical safety component to what we do.
What was originally going to be a little pre-amble into a description of a nice, low-key square in Madrid has turned into more of a rant than I intended, for which I apologise, and I assure you I have more than my fair share of white elephant photographs. I like those buildings, a lot of the time I'm making my living from those buildings, and I do see the value to our culture of having more criteria than 'Can I eat it, make money from it or live in it?'. Construction is one of the few areas left that, even with the widespread loss of traditional craftmanship, has a substantial niche for the bespoke.
The problem is that the building of ambitious construction projects in Spain with dodgy financing and even more questionable business plans has been identified as one of the major contributors to the current woes of the country. One of my colleagues was telling me today about a huge €1.1bn airport in Ciudad Real that was operational for less than three years before going into receivership. It's one of many examples that I hear about every day, when all the while I'm never far from the marching, shouting indignados on the street outside.
On a lighter note, and what I was initially planning to write about, the point being that it's not all about the centre of the city, or the big buildings, but really it's all about shoes...
...some time ago now I found myself in the Plaza Dos de Mayo (2nd May Square: named for the same Madrid uprising in 1808 that gives us that day as a holiday here), which is a little way north of the centre of the city. It seemed to be the heart of a great deal of family and community life - I don't know if it's the weather or just a cultural difference, but children seem to be far more involved in the city here than back in the UK. Maybe it's something to do with our reservedness and need to have our own gardens, which we then keep our children in rather than letting them share city squares.
Anyway, it was around the time of the San Isidro (patron saint of Madrid) festival, and as I sat drinking coffee in a cafe in the shade the children were running around in traditional outfits, chulapas, that made them look disconcertingly like very small old people. A number of them were mustachioed. It seemed like they were having fun.
.JPG)
I was sitting in the square having come up to that part of town in search of a shoe shop I had found written about on the internet - they sell traditional Spanish alpargatas (you know, those rope wedges that occasionally find themselves in fashion) and have done for generations. I needed to get some, but like a true tourist had fallen foul of the eccentric opening hours operated here. Of course one should expect a shop to open at quarter to five 'for the afternoon'. It's telling of the attitude toward time of a nation when they don't have separate words for afternoon and evening.
I bought some. I had been distracted by the curious phenomenon of Bubble Tea (more on that another day, I'm sure) by the time the shop eventually opened, but a few minutes late I headed back and I found it full. The proprietor seemed to have a short fuse, and was already at the end of it as a result of two apparently fairly thick English tourist girls so it wasn't quite the idyllic experience I'd been imagining. Good shoes though.
A big thing, love it or hate it, in architecture is the concept of the 'iconic' building. That big, shiny white elephant on the corner that people will travel miles to visit and everyone stops to photograph but that has real meaning to no-one at all because they don't live or work there. It's not a part of (almost) anyone's daily existence.
Cities fall over themselves to embrace the Guggenheim effect, while architects chase that big competition win. Architecture students try to conjure hypothetical landmarks on the street corners of provincial towns, unfettered by either cash flow or gravity but well versed in what makes an 'Icon'. Engineers are complicit, too, when we award prizes to buildings that we see little merit in beyond the fact that they are bigger and more expensive than the next.
The elegant little bits of design that sit silent but efficient in the corners of buildings (their very invisibility testament, often, to their ingenuity) are attributed no more praise than the shanty communities that develop unplanned yet seem to function on a basis of community engagement and shared ownership, albeit in the informal market. These need to be explained and promoted by their creators, as well as watched for and appreciated by building users. The architectural press, to their credit, has a nice line in appreciation of fine detail (the Detail section of the AJ, particularly, springs to mind as an example) while engineering journals can often veer wildly between incredibly broad-brush and uninformative or offputtingly dry and inaccessible.
As an aside, my brother and I both recently read a great book called Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand, which deals at length with the effective informal administrative arrangements of shanty town communities and the potential of developing world in general. Different parts of the book, which explores a wide range of topics all running along the lines of 'How do we save the planet?', seem to have relevance to conversations on a regular basis, so we keep referring back to it. I still harbour some doubts about some of Brand's comments about building without regulation or design in some of these (extremely seismic) areas of the world. Professional building designers may in the eyes of many be entirely superfluous but there is a critical safety component to what we do.
What was originally going to be a little pre-amble into a description of a nice, low-key square in Madrid has turned into more of a rant than I intended, for which I apologise, and I assure you I have more than my fair share of white elephant photographs. I like those buildings, a lot of the time I'm making my living from those buildings, and I do see the value to our culture of having more criteria than 'Can I eat it, make money from it or live in it?'. Construction is one of the few areas left that, even with the widespread loss of traditional craftmanship, has a substantial niche for the bespoke.
The problem is that the building of ambitious construction projects in Spain with dodgy financing and even more questionable business plans has been identified as one of the major contributors to the current woes of the country. One of my colleagues was telling me today about a huge €1.1bn airport in Ciudad Real that was operational for less than three years before going into receivership. It's one of many examples that I hear about every day, when all the while I'm never far from the marching, shouting indignados on the street outside.
On a lighter note, and what I was initially planning to write about, the point being that it's not all about the centre of the city, or the big buildings, but really it's all about shoes...
Anyway, it was around the time of the San Isidro (patron saint of Madrid) festival, and as I sat drinking coffee in a cafe in the shade the children were running around in traditional outfits, chulapas, that made them look disconcertingly like very small old people. A number of them were mustachioed. It seemed like they were having fun.
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I was sitting in the square having come up to that part of town in search of a shoe shop I had found written about on the internet - they sell traditional Spanish alpargatas (you know, those rope wedges that occasionally find themselves in fashion) and have done for generations. I needed to get some, but like a true tourist had fallen foul of the eccentric opening hours operated here. Of course one should expect a shop to open at quarter to five 'for the afternoon'. It's telling of the attitude toward time of a nation when they don't have separate words for afternoon and evening.I bought some. I had been distracted by the curious phenomenon of Bubble Tea (more on that another day, I'm sure) by the time the shop eventually opened, but a few minutes late I headed back and I found it full. The proprietor seemed to have a short fuse, and was already at the end of it as a result of two apparently fairly thick English tourist girls so it wasn't quite the idyllic experience I'd been imagining. Good shoes though.
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