Architects, Designers, couturiers, they all start with a clean line. When reality blurs that line, it creates a problem. Consider:
Ligne clair was drilled into me from early age, by teachers, parents, elders, gatekeepers who derided rough lines as messy, scrappy, dirty, or even, most disgustingly, as "hairy" using that term as a catch-all term (particularly in the feminine context) for bad. But the resulting pictures have less presence. They float, like architects' ghosts, failing to cast shadows or achieve mass. They abstract reality, in all its messy urgency, in favour of the line.
But, what is the line worth? Presence reduced to an almost-absence, guidelines dodged and dabbed away, it is less, not more, and it is certainly not enough for anything to grow in until there has been some entropy, some erosion, some accretion. But all this dirt and damage is swept away, repaired away, cleaned away, plucked away, to reveal the clean lines.
I say, no more clean lines. Reality is hairy. The maximalist, fully-activated city environment is the opposite of clean. Dirt gathers in its cracks and crevices and plants sprout from them, improvised and unplanned. The clean lines suffer what is perceived as a steady degradation, that needs to be scraped and scrubbed away in order to hold back the disaster of dilapidation. But what if instead it was elaboration, decoration, recreation, ornamentation?
As ever, there is are a quantity of things we need to get from here to there.
- Pockets shaved off a skirt for ruining the line
- Weeds burned from the edge of pavement for trapping litter
- Lintels and ledges excerpted from buildings to avoid creating spaces where birds might land, where fowl might foul
Ligne clair was drilled into me from early age, by teachers, parents, elders, gatekeepers who derided rough lines as messy, scrappy, dirty, or even, most disgustingly, as "hairy" using that term as a catch-all term (particularly in the feminine context) for bad. But the resulting pictures have less presence. They float, like architects' ghosts, failing to cast shadows or achieve mass. They abstract reality, in all its messy urgency, in favour of the line.
But, what is the line worth? Presence reduced to an almost-absence, guidelines dodged and dabbed away, it is less, not more, and it is certainly not enough for anything to grow in until there has been some entropy, some erosion, some accretion. But all this dirt and damage is swept away, repaired away, cleaned away, plucked away, to reveal the clean lines.
I say, no more clean lines. Reality is hairy. The maximalist, fully-activated city environment is the opposite of clean. Dirt gathers in its cracks and crevices and plants sprout from them, improvised and unplanned. The clean lines suffer what is perceived as a steady degradation, that needs to be scraped and scrubbed away in order to hold back the disaster of dilapidation. But what if instead it was elaboration, decoration, recreation, ornamentation?
As ever, there is are a quantity of things we need to get from here to there.
- In general, waste needs to become less harmful A lot of city waste is pollutants, oil grime, tarmac and rubbers dust, and much human-created waste is worthless and nasty - scraps of gum and plastic, for example. Cigarette butts, one of the most famous examples, have been co-opted as ad hoc insecticide for overcrowded nest boxes. by birds all over the world, although research suggests this behaviour may cause trouble in the long term. Reduced toxicity and fewer non-degradable items will create a healthier growing medium.
- A more graded approach to waste needs to be employed Washing or burning or poising away anything that isn't in the architect's plan or the designer's vision ignores the reality of an item that exists through time and will grow and be grown over. Creating a waste approach that acknowledges harmful/non-harmful, toxic/non-toxic, dangerous/non-dangerous and which allows moss or vegetation grow-over where plausible is core. Speaking of which:
- Moss-durable surfaces and buildings designed with grow-over in mind Paved drives are destroyed by moss. Ivy prises window frames from their walls. Buddleia drives a vegetable crowbar between the gutter and the roof, and will eventually drop bricks on passers-by below. Pretending otherwise won't help. Acknowledge the damage potential of vegetation, but build with its inevitability in mind. Not with the high-tech flourishes of green walls or roofs (much as I love these) but with textural control, guarded seams, sacrifice layers.
- A change in our attitude to urban animals and birds the great providers of poo in the urban environment (apart from us) need to shift out of urban clutter and into indicators of a vibrant urban ecosystem. At the moment there is a bit of an idealistic tree-hugger/perfomative sorry-but-to-be-a-realist divide, with neither side actually getting us where we need to go, which is to a human-commensurate semi-maintained, semi-wild stable urban biosphere. I suspect that approaching it unsentimentally, almost as a farming task, might produce the best results, but I would say that - I'm from a farming background.
- Public compost bins Not in isolation! I'm using public compost bins as a kind of marker, an example of taking a different attitude in the city centre, where we are all taking care of our urban climate and biosystem, keeping our urban heat island animal and plant friendly in winter, using water and plants to cool it in the summer, maintaining and building up our soil, using the nutrient richness of the human-shaped environment to create slicks of rich vegetable growth, which exude moisture that raises the clouds to wash the streets.
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