The Carbuncle Cup

Every year the Carbuncle Cup is awarded to the ugliest new building in Britain. This year's winner is the student residence at 465 Caledonian Road and it richly deserves the title. Here is an article by the Guardian. And another from the magazine that gives the award.

Here's an image for those of you too lazy to click a link (or doctrinally opposed to the Guardian):

For those of you who don't know UCL is University College London, known to me because it includes one of the best architecture schools in the world, called The Bartlett for some deeply English reason incomprehensible to a colonial. I was thinking about going there for my post-grad work but the cost (a staggering $50k per semester) and the serial and byzantine processes of application prevented me. I've written about the Bartlett before and don't wish to impugn it here. I only point out that UCL includes an absolutely fantastic architecture school because it makes the criminal negligence of everyone involved in the creation of the massive, description defyingly awful piece of shit more shocking.

My favourite line in the article is the spirited defense raised by the planning inspector who overturned the previous (and manifestly correct) decision telling the architect, developers, and everyone else involved in the project to go fuck themselves by stating the accommodations were, "unlikely to be perceived as overly oppressive by the occupiers." Strange, I would have thought "oppressive" was a sufficient condition to send the developers on their mercenary way. Apparently not. The decided factor appears to be the likelihood the conditions would be perceived as overly oppressive.

If you're looking at the picture and thinking, "It doesn't look that bad" there isn't much hope for you. Stay away from architecture as a career. On the other hand, that's just good advice for anyone. OK, the problem, aside from the fact of the facade held up in front as if it is (rightly) ashamed to show it's face, is that the windows on the fake facade don't line up with the windows in the rooms behind them. Meaning anyone unfortunate enough to get stuck living in one of those rooms has a view of a brick wall three feet from their window and zero sunlight. In most countries this would be seen as a violation of human rights if it was done in a prison.

The monthly rent of more than $1100 also deserves comment but vitriol tires me out (this is a recent development, I used to find it energizing). The rest of the building is just as hideous as that part shown in the photo for what seems to be the firm's hallmark of random massing, miserly use of materials, and violations of building codes and civic regulations about minimum standards of living.

The same firm (Stephen George and Partners) won a Carbuncle Cup a few years ago for an even more hideous student residence. Here's a picture:

Somewhat obviously, it's the one in the back. The building in front is Regent College. It was designed at some point in our history when people gave a shit.

I'm not sure which of Stephen George and Partner's two Carbuncle Cup winners is worse. Probably the latest. The residence mocking Regent College is so dreadfully, soul-sickeningly, spirit-wrenchingly terrible if I saw it on a student's drafting board I would tell that student to consider another program and them mock them horribly. The Caledonian Road residence is bad (criminally so) but it is also indicative of a global condition in architecture and something we are suffering from in Toronto. The idea historic preservation should consist of nothing more than propping up one face of a building is a terrible to me as the idea of preserving a person by the same means (ripping his or her face off and sticking it somewhere it doesn't belong).

NTE 2

If NTE (Near Term Extinction) is inevitable, as a group of climate scientists - the ones who coined the term - believe, we are faced with an unprecedented moral and philosophical problem. We, as a species, have always known we are mortal. It is a big part of both the human condition and the definition of humanity. We are born, we live, and then we die. That's the most basic statement anyone can truthfully make about humanity. Change just one word tho "We are born, we live, and then everybody dies" and the import of the statement changes completely. We can no longer achieve a surrogate immortality by the often pleasurable (but never simple) expedient of breeding. We can no longer achieve a surrogate immortality using any means.


And surrogate immortality is why we do most things. It's why we bother to stay sober longer than a few hours consecutively. Why we make buildings and cities instead of lying on the grass. Why we write books. Why we do anything that has the possibility of outlasting ourselves. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, to be mortal is to be constrained to a linear motion in a Universe where everything else moves in a cyclical motion if it moves at all. But our attempts at immortality were not attempts to join the great circular motion of the seasons or the stars but, rather, to preserve our particular contribution to the narrow line of human existence. Well, that's fucked now. We can see, within the span of our own lives, the point where that line ends. Nothing human passes that point. Sure, our buildings and books might survive but without humanity to understand them, to give them a place in the universe, they are meaningless and so, in a very real sense, gone.


This might be transparently obvious but it has required the possibility (some would say certainty) of the extinction of our species to make it clear to me: the entire human artifice, everything we do, say, and make, all our creations and ideas, our civilization compiled and refined over 160 000 years demands the existence of humans. When we go, it goes too. If we have, as NTE postulates, already committed suicide the only forms of human endeavor that make any sense are those previously considered worthless precisely because they were, by nature, transient. So playing music makes sense, composing it does not. Sex makes sense, procreation doesn't. Speaking still has value, writing has none. And those tasks and professions to which I have dedicated myself - building, teaching, and writing - are of no use or worth whatever.

On the one hand, that doesn't feel good. But on the other, and since hope is what we have left I'm sticking with this hand, if NTE doesn't occur it means I have managed to navigate by instinct to those professions that (because they require the continued existence of our species and our world to have any meaning) offer the greatest possibility of forging a connection between the narrow and linear human perception of time and the great cycles of the universe. That contribute most to eternity. I guess I should   change my ways if I want to live a philosophically coherent life. But, instead, I will do as the great majority of the our species is doing, pretend nothing is different. Nothing has changed. Maybe I'll re-read Don DeLillo's books. That strikes the perfect note of pathos without significantly changing my life.

On NTE (Near Term Extinction)

There is a group of reputable scientists (currently small but growing) who, in light of the massive preponderance of research on anthropogenic climate change, think the Near Term Extinction of the human species is not only possible or even probable, but inevitable. They differ, where they differ, on two principle points: the amount of time we have remaining (the definition of "near") and whether the human species will disappear entirely or suffer such a dramatic population loss that extinction will necessarily result (the definition of "extinction"). But whether the human species has fifty, one hundred, or two hundred years remaining or whether we will go with a bang or a whimper seems largely immaterial when faced with the proposition we have already sealed our own fate.

One of the central premises of NTE is there is no threshold left to cross. We have already passed not just one but many points of no return (or point of no returns?). In a very real sense our extinction is already happening. As Daniel Drumright puts in, "The evidence is quite explicit in detailing that the Holocene is exponentially drawing to a close. The geological epoch which [sic] has housed the entire history of civilization... is ending, if it hasn't ended already."

If correct, this certainly qualifies as big news. As far as humanity is concerned, it's the biggest news ever. Even if it is incorrect, and it would have to be massively incorrect for the error to be meaningful, it is still news. I mean by that, if NTE is not really extinction but a 99% reduction in the human population those scientists who believe in NTE are not wrong in any meaningful sense. Or if the extinction of our species requires three centuries (instead of happening this century), NTE is still correct. For it to be meaningfully incorrect, we would have to be able to avert a catastrophic population loss without, say, abandoning the planet. Still, if historians look back on NTErs are say, "what a bunch of lunatics" it is still news for a fairly important reason.

There have, throughout human history, been those who proclaimed, "The end is nigh!" As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, when Jesus said, "Take no thought for the morrow" (Matthew 6:34) he was either proclaiming the end times or an immoral and wicked man. The history of apocalyptic pronouncements needs no elaboration - it is a common feature across cultures and times, just part of the human condition. At least, until recently.

The history of rational man is very short. And by rational man I mean nothing more than some tiny percentage of the population using reason to govern their actions and opinions some small percentage of the time. In the West, rationality has only been a factor in our society for about 400 years. But some striking things about those 400 years are evident for anyone who wishes to see. First, at no point during the last 400 years have rational men used rational means to argue the end is nigh. In fact, there has been a general consensus (until the second half of the last century) that science and rationality would solve all human problems and we would reach a point where we knew all the answers to all the questions. We would then use reason to determine our goals and reason to achieve them, thus ending history. There has even been a consensus about how long it would take to reach that point. About one hundred years. If you asked a group of rational people in 1600 how long it would take until science and reason had solved every problem, the consensus would have been "about one hundred years". Same in 1700. Same in 1800. Einstein and Heisenberg kind of fucked us on that one. O well.

So NTE theorists (or believers or whatever) are unique in that they are proclaiming the end times based on the same methods by which we were supposed to avoid the end times (and make all believers in such things seem ridiculous). They might also be unique in being correct. Given human nature if the end does come there's bound to be some squabbling about who called it first and who got the reason right. If NTE is correct we can at least be thankful that ugly little episode will be short-lived.

It looks to me like one of two things is true. Either we are all going to die (and, significantly, at the same time) or we are going to realize science has produced its first crop of end timers. I, for one, would prefer the latter though I don't suppose my preference will have much effect on the outcome.