Royal Academy of IKEA

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The blog Standing Ovation, Seated takes a look at the “innovative” new work of architect Richard Rogers, who is going round pimping out what he calls the “shellhouse idea” – basically cheap, prefabricated, garish, plasticy-looking constructions, modular in form and “stackable”. I suppose in his mind this is revolutionary and never-before-attempted. In my mind (and I am at pains not to sound too much like Prince Charles here – I love the new skyscrapers and commercial buildings transforming the London skyline), this looks like just about every new residential building popping up in towns and cities across the UK. Cheap, bland, thoroughly forgettable and almost certain to age badly, just as the brutalist concrete architecture of the 1960s and 70s is doing. Still, a fascinating blog post well worth a read.

artmoscow's avatarStanding Ovation, Seated

Richard Rogers RA is an innovative architect who is behind the shellhouse idea. In short, this is IKEA concept extended to building houses. Pre-fab, cheap, fast, waterproof. And it can be stacked up to have more floors.

This weekend, the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts was turned into a construction site for a sample shellhouse.

The house is meant to be completed by tomorrow, the 13th, when it would become a colourful pendant to Joshua Reynolds’ somber monument, and RA visitors would be able to appreciate its beauty from the inside as well.

The building must be easy-to-assemble, for I’d not seen much of constructing going on in those few hours I spent there popping in and out of the RA for alfresco coffees (though “al cemento” would be a better term).

During all that time, Joshua Reynolds was sadly trying to reach the semi-erected house with his brush…

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On Dreams

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On Wednesday 28th August 1963, nearly three hundred thousand people marched on Washington, D.C. for jobs and freedom, and Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech:

 

Fifty years later to the day, a black man holds the office of President of the United States, and spoke from the same spot to mark the anniversary of an event which was critical in ensuring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

 

Among their other grievances and demands, the people who marched wanted the simple, unalienable dignity and civil right of being able to vote – to fully participate in the American democracy. I doubt many of them would have believed it had they been told that within fifty years, not only would black people in the South be able to vote freely without let or hindrance (more or less), but that a black presidential candidate would successfully run for the highest office in the land – and then win re-election in a landslide four years later.

As President Obama rightly noted in his remarks, much work remains to be done by those who, in their own ways, continue the march today. And in many ways, the issues that drew people to the National Mall on that day in 1963 – unemployment, living wages, equal access to justice, an end to discrimination – remain as intractable now as they were then.

But by God, we’ve come a long way.

Middle East Crisis Explained

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As is sometimes the case, Guido Fawkes says it best. Courtesy of Guido, a cut-out-and-keep guide to who supports, hates or tolerates who in the Middle East. It was posted a couple of hours ago, so is probably already out of date.

A Positive Story From Syria

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

A brief but welcome glimmer of light in the darkness that is today’s Syria – a grieving father is reunited with the son that he believed had been killed in an attack by pro-regime forces.

 

Max Fisher, writing at The Washington Post, breaks the story for a western audience, and gives this context:

The man who first appears when the video opens isn’t the father – he’s someone else, perhaps another relative. It’s not until a minute in that the boy’s father appears, his face twisted in joy, running out of the house to see his son.

Even if you don’t speak a word of Arabic, the family’s body language says everything. There is a lot of crying and hugging and grateful recitations of the Takbir (“Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!”).

I am still collecting my thoughts on the latest developments in Syria – the irrefutable use of chemical weapons by regime forces or others loyal to Assad, and the seemingly inevitable military response from the west.

Barring the unveiling of some hitherto-unseen wise and strategic foreign policy or diplomatic initiatives from Barack Obama and David Cameron (neither of whom have stellar track records in this area), I am convinced that nothing good can come of any of this. I genuinely don’t see how any of the likely military scenarios that may play out in the coming days will benefit the innocent civilians of Syria, the national security goals of the west or (somewhat materialistically) the economic and financial wellbeing of anyone at all.

But at least, among the many stories of loss and mourning, there is at least one human story from Syria today with a happy ending.

The short piece concludes:

If you can hold it together through all seven minutes, you’re stronger than I am. But this video provides a welcome, if all too rare, moment of solace and joy in a war that has had precious little of either.

I’m with Max Fisher on this one.

Naked Hypocrisy, Ctd.

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Of the various things written in the aftermath of TV chef Jamie Oliver’s recent comments about nutrition and cooking habits among poor people and families in Britain, I eventually found perhaps the most reasoned analysis at The Telegraph.

Joanna Blythman writes:

I make a point of trading up with food, buying good quality unprocessed ingredients, and often pay with a debit card. Occasionally, when the bill comes to more than I’d expect, I make a mental note to pay more attention to prices, but a little overspend isn’t a disaster; I won’t end up down the pawnshop.

So how humbling it was to see that that most customers in this store had no such security. These were people – it’s generally women who shoulder the responsibility for the family food spend – who always paid in cash, often a mixture of notes, coins, tokens and vouchers, which they meticulously counted out, sometimes betraying a slight anxiety that there wouldn’t be quite enough. They clearly budgeted by the day, not the week. As for the luxury of stocking up on things that might come in handy at some point, forget it. Their finances were on a knife-edge, and food outlay was a critical factor.

I could have given them a sanctimonious little lecture about spending their money more wisely – in many cases, pet food was arguably the most nutritious item in their trolleys, amid a pile of processed junk – but it would have been monstrously insensitive to do so. If you’re trying really hard to eke out your money, it seems cheaper, and it’s the line of least resistance, to fill everyone up on cheap carbs and low-grade processed meat. And yet, there were nearly always a couple of products in the line-up – some apples on promotion, or clementines, perhaps – that showed a touching aspiration to eat better.

This is exactly the point that I was trying to make in my own comments yesterday. It is easy to make smug and sanctimonious throwaway remarks about how people should take an axe to their broadband internet subscriptions or mobile phone contracts (as if most of us could realistically imagine living without either) before deigning to eat a cheap, unhealthy microwave meal, and many commenters seem to have fallen into precisely this trap.\

Like me, Blythman also gives Oliver credit where credit is due:

To be fair to Oliver, though, his thoughts are more nuanced than the provocative headlines might suggest. If he manages to show graphically how some of the poorest people are routinely ripped off by companies selling products that seem cheap, but that are actually rotten value for money, then more power to his elbow.

Be under no illusion, our large food retailers and manufacturers are making a mint from selling poor people over-packaged, nutrient-light, additive-dense food products, while trumpeting how they are helping them make ends meet.

And if Oliver can help people see how, by buying unprocessed raw ingredients, and cooking more, rather than relying on the sweepings from the manufacturer’s floor, they can eat better for the same, or less money, then that will be a sterling service to the nation.

This is an important area that I somewhat overlooked when I wrote my initial reaction to Oliver’s comments yesterday. In that piece I focused on the three aspects of food preparation knowledge, available spare time and social norms that go into determining what ends up on the family dining table (or, let’s be realistic, our laps while we sit and watch television). But supermarkets and food manufacturers cannot entirely escape censure for their part in making it harder for consumers to choose healthy options through their use of awkward quantity packaging and opaque pricing special offers.

Whether the answer lies with a government enquiry, more heavy-handed regulation of the food retail industry and active subsidisation of local markets and other initiatives, as Blythman seems to advocate, is another question entirely. Readers can probably anticipate my immediate reaction to the idea of another government enquiry and the further empowerment of our controlling, paternalistic government. But yet she does raise some valid points, and so I will give her the last word.

This sums up perfectly the issue that Jamie Oliver struggled to articulate in his controversial comments:

So what Oliver should address is how, when all the pressures in our society conspire to woo people away from scratch cooking of good-quality raw materials onto a convenience food diet, we can help them to resist.

…

Cooking is to food what books are to literacy: it allows us to become the controllers of our personal food destiny. Poor or rich, we’re all just suckers for processed food without it.

Amen to that.