From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
I've been spending an inordinate amount of time in Lancashire allotments on a research trip sponsored by Livesey/Wilson associates - the regeneration consultants set up by the late Tony Wilson and his partner Yvette. Yes, that Tony Wilson: Factory records, the Hacienda, Joy Division et al. This boggy, scrubby, almost abandoned allotment overlooking Accrington seems a long way from the cool, sparse, post-industrial sound of the North West wrapped up in Peter Saville graphics. Factory Records borrowed Andy Warhol's art affectation - the appropriation of an industrial term to describe art practice - and applied it to the original landscapes of the industrial revolution. By inverting the idea of a Factory, the normal Fordist aims of industry are suddenly perverted and equally artist-as-genius mythologies are overturned. Warhol and Wilsons Factories manufactured culture rather than goods. For Factory, this crystalised in the Hacienda which retooled a Victorian textile factory into a industrially themed machine producing youth culture by the yard. Perhaps, in an echo of this inversion-of-expectation, Livesey/Wilsons suggestion is that allotments could be a place which produced much more than prize-winning marrows. An allotments produce might also be cultural, its fruits being community, education, independence, and health benefits. In this way, allotments - usually left over spaces around the 'important' bits of towns and cities - could become significant regeneration drivers producing both fresh veg and social capital. The era of industrialisation links factories and allotments. They are opposite kinds of production: one private, the other public. It's this history which provides a neat connection between Livesey/Wilsons Factory and Allotment interests and suggests they might be part of the same project: the reinvention of the post-industrial. Perhaps another attraction is that an allotment might be the closest urbanism gets to the ability of a record label to manufacture creativity out of specific, localised condition. Could the model of a bands trajectory from a bunch of kids rehearsing in a nearby yard to stadium tours be played out through vegetables? Perhaps the spirit of post-punk independent music - extinguished by the tedium of a corporatised music business - is alive and well in the municipal vegetable patches of Britain. Maybe horticulture is the new hedonism, rotavating the new rock and roll. Depsite their apparent ephermerality, the sheds built entirely out of old doors, old caravans propped up on bricks, tarpaulins roped over improvised structures, allotments are serious and significant spaces. They give us a glimpse of another set of architectural possibilities: a different order of space whose politics and heritage are different from the cities that have developed around them. Allotments have a spatial archeology that contains other means of organization, other kinds of collectivism, other definitions of productivity. As Livesey/Wilson suggest, they might well be places fertile enough to cultivate a particularly juicy, succulent kind of regeneration. Just as Factory and the Hacienda drew on Situationist tradition - Wilson quotated from the 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' : "The Hacienda must be built" - so too does the allotment project. Beneath the topsoil, a terrain of unknown pleasure.
Stepping into an allotment is stepping into a domain that's somehow different. The origin of allotments are ancient - the common ground of Anglo-Saxon Britain. They are a type of space that has survived a thousand years of increasing private control: The Norman concentration of land ownership into the hands of manorial lords, monasteries and church; The Elizabethan enclosure of common grounds; the shift from agrarian and rural to urban and industrialised society and so on. Contemporary allotments are a formalisation of these ancient territories by Victorian legislation which required land to be set aside for allotment use for the landless poor.
Posted by anothersam at November 16, 2008 11:53 AM.
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Book Review: The Infrastructural City
The Michael Jackson Monument Design Competition
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Now Viewing: Married To The Eiffel Tower
Le Corbusiers Image Hoard: Poeme Electronique
Giant American Signs: Original Learning from Las Vegas Footage
Giant Soviet Signs Cut Into Forests
Bricks Melted Into Icicles: Napalm Decorative
C-Labs 'Unfriendly Skies' & 'Bootleg' Volume
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Sim Seasons Greetings! The Rise of Neo-Winter
Geography in Bad, Festive Drag.
Simulations of Industry: High Tech Architecture and Thatcherism
From The Factory to the Allotment: Tony Wilson, Urbanist
Koolhaas HouseLife / Gan Eden: The Revenge of Architectural Media
Ruburb-ric: The Ecologies of the Farnsworth House
Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham Redux
Acts of Un-Building: Timelapse Demolitions
Yard Filth: Next Years Hot Look
Stonehenge: A Black Hole At The Heart Of British Architecture
The Popemobile: Mechanised Robes & Motorised Architecture
The Secret Language of Surface
Information Fields: Agriculture as Media
My Bloody Valentine: Sound as Substance
A Cubist Copse: Gehrys Serpentine Pavilion
Spouting Off: Some Thoughts On The Fountainhead
Form Follows Dysfunction: Bad Construction & The Morality of Detail
Vintage Tradeshow Surrealism: International Grune Woche
Moving Houses: Buildings In Motion
Desktop Study: The Strange World of Sports Studio Design
Married to the Eiffel Tower: More Objectum Sexuals
60 Years of The Crazy Horse Memorial
Married to the Berlin Wall: "The Best and Sexiest Wall Ever Existed!"
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The Cinderella Effect: Phantom Architectures of Illumination
Two Deaths and a Retirement: The Strange Shape of British Architecture
If London Were Like New York: Antique Schizo-Manhattanism
If London Were Like Venice: Antique Geo-Poetic Speculations and Hydro-Fantasy
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NASA: Mapping the Moon with Sport
Lemon Squeezy: Design Tendencies after the Juicy Salif
The Nihilistic Beauty of Weapons Arranged in Patterns
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Authentic Replicas: Football and the Franchising of Place
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A Wishing Well with a Fat Up Pipe
The Camoufluers and the Day-Glo Battleship
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Kim Jong II, The Great Architect
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Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham
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Scary Suburbanism: Why Horror is at Home in the Suburbs
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Revisions to the Architecture of Hell
Crufts: Dogs, Design and Aesthetic Genetics
Eos Airlines: Executive Bubbles over the Atlantic
Google Earths Vertiginous Mapping
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Reading Lines: Skateboarding and Public Space
Chris Cornish: Prototyping History
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Anything to Feel Weightless Again: The Cargo Lifter and the Tropical Island Resort
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2000 Years of Non Stop Nostalgia. Or How Half Timbering Made Me Whole Again.
Backpeddling into the Future: The Historical-Futurism of British Architecture
Miss Selfridges' Feeling for Fake Snow. The Oxford St. Lights and Why We Need Artificial Winter
New Tory Logo: A Hazy Shade of Politics
Jeff Koons, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Serpentine
Celebrity Scents: The Bittersweet Smell of Success
Imperfect Pitch - Football, Space and Landscape
Product Placement: Making the Impossible Possible
Suburban Growth: Matthew Moores Field of Dreams
Perfect Sound Forever: The Secret Function of High End Stereos
A Little Light Product Placement
Some Advice To A Young Designer
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The Psychotic Utopia of the Suburbs and the Suburbanisation of War.
In a Lonely Place - Under Construction
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Football Pitch: Best of British
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An Incredible Smell of Roasting Coffee
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Everything Counts - The Sound of Geography Collapsing.
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