Miller Architect

‘Gather round boys and girls and listen

To the tale of the giant stone eater

and how the earth was ravaged

during the years of the great stone shortage…’

The opening lines of the song ‘The Tale of the Giant Stone Eater’ by the Sensational Alex Harvey Band (aka SAHB).  SAHB was one of the most unconventional rock bands of the 1970s. I saw them live in their home town of Glasgow at the height of their fame. The music ranged from avant garde progressive rock to experimental jazz. The lyrics from this song sound as if they were lifted from a book of Edward Lear’s nonsense verse – ‘a giant stone eater’ and ‘a great stone shortage’.

Wind forward to the present day and the words seem less fantastical. Worldwide increase in population and urbanisation is indeed bringing about a great stone shortage. There is a long term decline in the permitted reserves of land based sand, gravel and crushed rock and the use of marine sand and gravel together with recycled materials and industrial and mineral waste as aggregates has increased. There is even a black market in it.

Many of us think of supplies of sand, and its larger cousin gravel, as infinite making it hard to believe that something as commonplace could be valuable but like everything else – water, oil, minerals etc we are going to have to start thinking about it.

One partial solution is the use of recycled plastic as a building material which would help us establish a more circular economy and clean up the plastic waste strewn about the planet. But no new plastic please – for the sake of the climate hydrocarbons should be left in the ground.

Edward Burne-Jones ‘The Golden Stairs’ Tate Britain, London

‘Victorian’ art, which fell suddenly out of fashion after it was created, has gradually returned to fashion over the last 50 years.  This is especially true of the work of the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’ who sought a return to the detail, colours and complex compositions of the 15th century Italian art that existed before the time of Raphael and Michaelangelo.

Edward Burne-Jones ‘The Beguiling of Merlin’ Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight

Edward Burne-Jones (1833 – 98) was one of the last ‘Pre-Raphaelites’ as well as one of the pioneers of the arts and crafts movement.  His rejection of the industrial world and embrace of traditional craftsmanship speaks to our own time where resource depletion and the need for human dignity suggests a more hand-made world. His romantic world of myths and legends, medieval, religious and folk themes is echoed in the escapism of modern myth based films and computer games.

For anyone even remotely interested in the Pre-Raphaelites or the Arts and Crafts movement or the decorative arts in general the Burne-Jones exhibition at Tate Britain is not to be missed as it brings so much together in one place including two series of paintings – ‘Persius’ and ‘The Legend of the Briar Rose’ – reassembled for the exhibition.  Seen together his work leaves a powerful impression in terms of its quality, imagination and originality of composition but mostly its basic weirdness. It took us a short while to return to everyday reality from this fantasy world after we came out.

Edward Burne-Jones ‘The Briar Wood’ Buscot Park, Oxfordshire

Whereas early golf courses were laid out to follow the ‘lie of the land’ modern golf courses have ‘architects’. Large sums of money are spent to manipulate the topography of the landscape and introduce trees and water features.

Take the venue of this year’s Ryder Cup – the ‘L’Albatros’ course at ‘Le Golf National’ in Paris designed by architects Hubert Chesneau and Robert Von Hagge in collaboration with Pierre Thevenin. What started out as a flat wheat field was transformed using material from demolition and excavation sites in the Paris area. Over the course of three years in the late 1980’s, 400 trucks per day imported 1,600,000 m3 of material which was combined with 600,000 m3 of soil excavated on site to create a completely new landscape. The course was further modified and improved in advance of the Ryder Cup and then manicured to within an inch of its life for the big event itself.

Ryder Cup 2018 Le Golf National Paris Photo Franck Biton

Part of the skill of a golf course ‘architect’ is creating drama with the best hole often being the final hole. At the ‘L’Albatros’ the 18^th hole is a stunner with water on the left, pot bunkers on the right and a semi-island green. Mais quelle deception! – the Ryder Cup is match play golf not stroke play golf meaning that matches often end before all the holes have been played. On this occasion only six of the twenty eight Ryder Cup matches actually played the final hole. Still it looked pretty in the photographs even if it hardly featured in the golf.

Many moons ago I crewed on an ocean racing yacht during Clyde week that had been designed for, and competed in, the three-quarter ton cup in Norway. It was specifically designed for the anticipated wind and sea conditions. I asked the skipper how it had fared. ‘Not well’ was the reply. The wind and sea conditions turned out to be completely different from what was anticipated when the racing took place. As Robert Burns put it in 1786 ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’men/ Gang aft a-gley’.

Labour has called Theresa May the ‘architect’ of Windrush. She must be a naval architect because Windrush was a ship. She joins a new generation of ‘architects’ that includes Vladimir Putin the ‘architect’ of Kremlin policy in the Ukraine and General Jon Pyong-Ho the ‘architect’ of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes. Also good to know that ‘Rose McGowan will not be silenced as the ‘architect’ of Harvey Weinstein’s downfall’.

Empire Windrush. London Docks

There seem to be ‘architects’ everywhere at the moment – in the sense of people who create and implement a plan. The architectural profession could take it as a compliment were in not that there seems to be an implied fiendish or sinister ‘too clever by half’ quality in many cases. The architect as Bond villain (in fact Ian Fleming got the name Goldfinger from the architect Erno Goldfinger). Search online and you can read about the ‘architects’ of global jihad and the holocaust.

In terms of building design the title ‘architect’ is protected in the UK under Section 20 of the Architects Act 1997. The title can only be used by someone who is registered with the Architects Registration Board. This is deemed to be in the public interest through the protection of public health, safety and welfare, consistency of standards and quality of service.

Pity the poor architects who simply design buildings who see the appropriation of their hard earned title. Or maybe the comprehensive solutions of the megalomaniac tendency within the profession have created the fiendish connection in the minds of the public. To that extent we are the ‘architects’ of our own misfortune.

Many years ago I knew a guy in Glasgow who claimed to have a brother who ‘didn’t exist’. This wasn’t in the literal or existential sense, it was in the sense that he wasn’t known to the tax or national insurance agencies, wasn’t on the electoral register and didn’t have a registered address for council tax etc. He lived entirely in the cash economy. His line of work was buying flats for cash, spraying everything inside white to cover a multitude of sins and them letting them for cash. I wonder where he is now and how he is faring in the digital economy where it seems everything is known and the prospect of ‘not existing’ is remote unless you have no mobile phone, everything is by word of mouth, payments are made in cash and communications are made by handwritten note.

Social network diagram author DarwinPeacock, Maklaan

The ‘scandal’ of the misuse of personal data by Cambridge Analytica has suddenly brought the issue of data privacy into focus. The political consultancy firm ‘harvested’ data about tens of millions of Facebook users by using personality quizzes to build up psychological profiles which were then used for bespoke political advertising. Facebook has tried to look like the innocent victim of data theft but it is only an extension of the way Facebook itself makes its millions – by building up individual psychological profiles to sell to advertisers to create bespoke targeted content.

Facebook’s data gathering is probably just the tip of the iceberg. A recent article in Bloomberg about the data mining company ‘Palantir’ entitled ‘Palantir Knows Everything About You’ is quite scary. It describes how tiny pieces of the seemingly unimportant data that we unthinkingly give away can be assembled into a secret digital dossier of our life.

No amount of guarantees will ever convince me that data stored by others is secure. My assumption has always been that any data that I ‘ping off’ or enter anywhere is liable to get into unknown hands. If I ever want to do anything subversive I’ll take a leaf out of the book of the brother of the guy in Glasgow.