CROFTING VISIONS – THE CHALLENGE OF MEANING IN ARCHITECTURE

David Kerr Cameron has written a set of three books on crofting life: The Ballad and the Plough, Willie Gavin, Crofter Man, and The Cornkister Days - all originally published by Victor Gollancz, (1978, 1980 and 1984 respectively), and republished by Birlinn in 2008. Iain R Thomson has written his account of being a shepherd in the remote Scottish highlands in Isolation Shepherd, also published by Birlinn, in 2007. All of these books give a detailed insight into these lifestyles, without, it seems, any exaggeration or unnecessary gloss; but the mere fact that these details have been made the subject chosen by the Edinburgh publisher, gives them an aura that, in spite of the rigours detailed in the texts, stimulates a certain attractiveness in city-bound folk hemmed in by others, buildings, roads, and traffic - their annoying bulk and noise that divert attentions from all of the benefits of such congregations.

There is a certain romance about these remote lives that we secretly yearn for; something poetically idyllic that enriches and stimulates a desire to seek out such an existence away from the detested hustle and bustle. Shows like Escape to the Country are rooted in these dreams and offer only grand promises of release that confirm all hopes. The drawings of Beatrix Potter, with and without their cute animals - Potter draws beautifully and uses her vivid imagination to bring the quaint animals to life in her beautiful, magical world - confirm this peculiarly picturesque perception of life in the country: everything good, open and wonderful; both large and small. Little wonder that the crofting vision is so sought after. Beatrix Potter's life and work is illustrated in Susan Denyer's lovely book, At Home with Beatrix Potter, published by Frances Lincoln in 2000. It is a handsome book full of everything the dream might wish for, in beautiful shining colour on quality paper with an impressively large ten inch square format that enhances the sense of isolation, openness, fresh air and distance envisaged in the dream.

Yet, in all of these visions, if one looks closely with a keen eye looking and seeing the world carefully, not embellished with the exaggerations of dreamy, (the typo is good; dramy, as in “Have a dram or two”), ambitions and their wonders sensed in the cosy safety of one's own lounge room, one could soon discover that one might be very disconcerted and discontent, disheartened with a crofter's life, in much the same way as the Potter spaces could be revealed as uncomfortably tiny, cold, damp, and dank, complete with woodworm - those notorious qualities of old homes in the 'old country.' Crofting was no easy existence, no matter how pretty, 'green' or earthy it might appear, even though the crofter did all the 'right' things: he was his own boss, ploughed his own field, (the holdings were never large), grew his own food, and milked his own cows. Cameron and Thomson make the pattern of work and the tasks involved very clear.

Here one recalls the television programme where a family of four left Britain for Indonesia with less than one hundred pounds, with the plan to indulge in their vision to live without money, while being totally self-sufficient. It did not take them long to discover that, in spite of their good feelings and best intentions, there was no currency other than cash when nothing else appeared, or when others were not going out of their way to assist the homeless group. The country lifestyle seems perfect only to one looking through the rose-tinted glasses enhancing the luxurious comforts and indulgences of the 'if only' of the modern lifestyle with its constant dissatisfaction, craftily transposing comforts onto the Potter-crofter world to create an impossible amalgam: but few care about the reality, and the wishful dream continues. It seems that realism has been suspended in favour of hopeful, hopeless futures. It is a popular TV theme - the family off to live the Robinson Crusoe life in a far-flung island, arriving with nothing but hope, and a TV crew complete with every backup this requires. One wonders how much the family might have been paid for this participation that only encourages the dreamers who forget about the camera in favour of the vision that is oddly, almost ironically, known as 'reality' TV.

Who would eat home-grown and home-ground oatmeal gruel four times a day, for each meal and supper, in various forms - hot, cold, liquid, solid, maybe with or without some added luxury such as honey or fruit? This was the crofter’s situation. It was one in which the croft could never produce enough for survival, making another job essential, a necessary involvement that meant conflicting tasks and timetables. These challenges could only be accommodated by early risings and with work on the croft continuing late into the night. In winter, this meant work in the field by lantern. The dark side of country life is never revealed in the Country Life-like publications that indulge in the 'ye olde English' Gertrude Jekyll country-garden prettiness, and the matching, country-quaint Lutyens house to warm the cockles of the town-and-city heart. Light is never thrown on things dim and grim - the vermin, the draughts, the sheer effort to be.

Still, the life, as a still life, is drooled over by folk with the tourist's mentality – see: https://springbrooklocale.blogspot.com/2012/06/who-or-what-is-tourist.html Here the mind is blind to everything except personal entertainment, distractions, a circumstance that offers no challenge, no responsibility, just instant, uncommitted pleasure. This seems to have become the modern condition. Tourism is every country's hope, every city or town's opportunity - just consider the Bilbao story where a grimy, dirty industrial city was transformed into a gleaming tourist attraction by designer 'names' like Gehry, Foster and Calatrava. The world is becoming a place shaped for tourists, tourism, designed specifically to attract more and more of them for profit, income, with an unrelenting enthusiasm. Every region has become a place crammed with tourists; places become known by tourists only as busy and crowded cities or towns or villages of 'tourist interest,' full of tourists, with everyone arriving to see the local promotions illustrated in the publications, with plans only to move on quickly to the next 'attraction' on the list. The Isle of Skye is now so busy, it is no longer attractive. It has become just too much loved, a sheer hell of busy business; a constant clutter of visitors. Nearly every residence is a B&B or a guest house. Barcelona is so much visited that locals are complaining, calling for controls: 12,000 tourists visit Gaudi's cathedral every day. The authenticity of place is annihilated. Tiny Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, (total population of all islands is 20,000), sometimes is flooded with well over 4,000 tourists in one day from the cruise ships that call in regularly: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/01/tourism-city-comes-to-town.html Over 50 ships visit Lerwick during the season. The experience for locals is so bad that the ship-free days get marked on the calendar to identify the times a visit to town would be possible, tolerable. The visitors actually spend very little. All meals are provided onboard. A few souvenirs are purchased, and some bus tours. Visitors like to stroll around and get a feel for the sights and the way of life. Shopkeepers say they have many tourists come into their stores, just to look around and move on. A few visitors might get a coffee so that they can get a seat to write postcards, or to enjoy the free Wi-Fi.

Skye

Lerwick on 'cruise-ship' day

But who cares? The ships are encouraged and turn up every year in increasing numbers. In the same insane way, wind turbines are promoted in Shetland while its landscape is eulogised, promoted for tourism as an untouched natural treeless wonder, loved by photographers who soon discover that 'capturing' the promoted identity involves a constant battle with the visual interruptions of fence posts, telegraph poles, and wind turbines, their exclusion, as they nearly always intrude and spoil the ‘unspoilt’ vision seen in and promised by the perhaps photo-shopped brochures. The same mentality is involved here as that applied to the crofter's life vision - a specific, irrational, selective blindness to actual wholeness, the rigour of integral quality, essential meaning, and a lack of commitment to this core relevance, its uniqueness. The carelessness of tourism is transposed into attitudes that will make no effort or compromise, will involve no hardship that might disrupt anticipations, the constant demand for the flow of nice feelings, and free and complete access to everything 'interesting' - all as seen on TV - irrespective of the impact.

Wind farm proposal for the Shetland Islands

The turbines are never seen in the promotional images

To even understand the issues here, there first of all needs to be the recognition and understanding of the unique quality at the core of the matter before a commitment can be made; before the will to do nothing, to sacrifice nice feelings, desires and indulgences is realised: such is essential for the well-being of place, person or possibilities, in spite of profits. Here the biblical, 'for what should it profit a man . . ' comes to mind, because we could easily lose our soul in this distracted, destructive urge. Care and responsibility need to be involved. These are not just vague emotions, but include the determination to respond with a knowing empathy. Sadly the world of tourism, and of country real estate promotions, involves precisely selective visions, incomplete understandings that choose particular pieces - the 'nice' bits - for folk to engage in, indulge in - “Wow!” - while the wholeness is never revealed in its entirety, and the untold remainder is ignored, denied, concealed in the limitation that is the lie promoted with big grins, happy faces and a shared, self-supporting, self-promoting, self-confirming euphoria.

Architecture and architects are not immune from this selective, rose-coloured thinking. The results are the same: piecemeal and incomplete understanding, fragmented, selective visions that only distort, confound and confuse to suit the ambition, the hopeful dream that is never confirmed by living, by life that is always far more complex and inclusive. An implied simplicity always denies the awkward richness of variety. Modernity fought for the supremacy of simplicity and insisted on rejecting complexity in ideas and forms. Recent work is again involving complexity, but with little aim, idea or theory beyond the exercise of clever digital techniques that exclude subtlety in a diversity of concerns. Both approaches deny meaning its role, distort feeling and its involvement in being.

Sullivan called for honesty in architecture. It seems that the call needs to be restated in our tourist's wonderland - modernity: or is it post-modernity? Whatever one might label it, it is a worrying circumstance, a world of make-believe that one is made to believe, like cruise holidays: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/01/tourism-city-comes-to-town.html - one that never will extend beyond its own limited framework, or be interested in these other fields of understanding. We must do better than this self-perpetuating shambles if meaning is to mean anything; if wholes are to be perceived in their entirety rather than as holes to be filled with the personal paraphernalia of vivid visions that touch the world so lightly, so singularly, so specifically that they shroud matters of rich and vital meaning, matters fuzzy, complex and confusing, but real. Unusually, engineering is showing more interest in these fuzzy matters than architecture is, even though architects see their world as far more poetic. Even physicists are inclusively considering this quantum world of uncertainty. Architects need to do more, be more open-minded, more inclusively interested in life, living and being, because architecture is fundamentally about accommodation and shelter, both of the simple functions of being, and of those more complex, less certain realities perhaps best described as 'the spirit.'

P.S.

So on wind turbines? If the commitment is to landscape, turbines must be banned as on Lord Howe Island: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/10/shetlands-challenge.html

And crofting life? One has to engage with the extremes of good and bad in order to understand rather than indulge in a pure good-feel fantasy.

Tourism? The idea of travelling entertainment seeking unique intrigues for fun has to be reconsidered by society as a whole if we are to truly know our world. We are in grave danger of turning everything into a spectacle for profit.

Architecture? . . . less indulgence in pretence and appearances.

THE BILBAO IDEAL

THE MESS

'Cleaned up' by modernism

Ordinary living is never sufficiently 'architectural'

Even the digital world is chaotic

The ordinary everyday is never seen in the 'architectural' image

The signs of everyday use are shunned by 'style'

Even play is sanitised and stylised

The historic mess held meaning

The question is: how do we best live?

NOTE

29^th October 2019

THE CONCEPT OF THE ARTIST

Jon Lys Turner The Visitors’ Book In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller Constable 2017, page 25-26 describes the artistic movement post-Bloomsbury in London:

In contrast to the almost exclusively Oxford-educated Bloomsbury set, class was irrelevant to the Fitzrovians. Even the richest of Wirth-Miller’s contemporaries affected not to care about social hierarchies or the mores of the day. Debauchery and drunkenness crossed all social and sexual distinctions. The new bohemians shared with the Bloomsburians a rejection of bourgeois value, and an emphasis on personal relationships and individual pleasure. They could never be called an artistic or literary movement: there was no united style or intellectual synchronicity to their creativity beyond the desire to push the boundaries. While Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and other Bloomsbury artists collectively broke the distinction between framed art, design and decoration, the young Fitzrovians for the most part pursued the more individualistic artistic transgressions while in their studios or at their desks. Their collective action was merely to drink excessively together and enjoy the ensuing chaos. The most important characteristic was to be interesting.

Is this our legacy today – the vision of the artist as a bohemian in a studio, pursuing ‘individualistic artistic transgressions,’ with the ‘most important characteristic’ being that the artist has to be ‘interesting’ - has to be noticed?