The Stalking Eye: an interpretation of a Cedric Price sketch
Ruminations on an architect's idea. Cedric Price designed the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo.
My eyes intend towards the capitalised FIR. I carry my over-engineered, 1970s Samsonite suitcase of experiences towards the rubber stamped, red lettering. This is the sort of stamp used by shop coat wearing postmasters back in the cap doffing days of ‘knowing your place’. Two whacks on a hardwood counter and the smell of ink and dust.
I’ve pushed my way through the scratchy lower branches of tightly planted conifers as a child, a dreamer and a forester. My feet have sunk into the mossy mattress of the ground: they say that the forest floor is soaked in acid. We called it The Forestry. I watched my childhood friend’s tennis shoes become distant in these places; perpetually two feet higher than my red face. His physical form, hewn as it was from the fact of being indigenous, slashed upwards across the OS contour lines perpetually and fast.
FIR. I notice your visual references to that word below in your beautiful imprint. These are barely marks, but they lean heavily towards the oriental character. Snapped Japanese simplicity. Exactly, and I thank you for that. I do feel, however, that you’re depicting Sitka spruce, Noble or Douglas fir and not the Scots pine that you are significantly referencing. My sense is that you drew this from the passenger seat of a 1984 Series Three, 88” Lightweight Land Rover in a sports jacket that smelt strongly of tobacco. You’re encased in aluminium and framed by rivets.
You’re thinking this scene in whips and flourishes with foundations of side-of-lead scribbles. You can skim across the cartridge paper, as for you the whole thing is malleable anyhow. Why press the pencil hard if you’re building-in obsolescence? Actually, those Keynesian, Wilsonian firs I harp on about do come and go, along with the hands that planted and felled them. Architecture adapts to elites; cultural and otherwise.
Since there’s a box, could it be pre-cast concrete?
Say the solid sort used on motorway bridges, with fins and pebbles.
Left to sit, the walls will gather green patinas and nestle closer to the firs, eventually smelling of ink and dust and the oil of tractors.
I know this drawing represents an architect-among-friends type situation and I’m impressed that there are no spots of Cotes Du Rhone that need deft incorporation into the paper by a wetted brush. I can hear the evening laughter by the fire, perhaps at the expense of the Prince of Wales. You’re dotting around the perfectly balanced drawing, using the lines and swirls to map mischievous ideas. This is a campaign of the mind and your fingers are like little flags reaching back into the past as if it is the future. It’s 2003. Yes, all this, this intellectual exploration, was only just still possible then. It’s true that it doesn’t matter if it’s built, but architects now build things or vanish. Architects now build things in response to a new conception of efficacy. Some might say that architects now build too many things.
An aviary is something to build for certain. Building an enduring house for birds is a worthy occupation; spiritual even. I imagine you’d have had a long time to think about it, sketch, discuss and present. Getting the aviary perfect at London Zoo - now renamed ZSL - meant that it survived well but now, adhering to your embrace of change and consequent adaption, is being “…reimagined, allowing it to reclaim its status as an outstanding modern building.” (ZSL) My hunch is that this ‘reimagination’ will be done rather too indecently fast for your liking; plus, it now houses monkeys alongside parrots. How would you have handled a shopping centre? They are interesting in that they don’t adapt to anyone; rather they rely on the fact that the visitor adapts to them. This is how it is now.
Could we use windows that have a coating of smoke?
Windows that conceal their exquisite, rarefied exclusivity behind their utilitarian bevels?
Can the forest be framed in long thin lines
And knee-weakening walls of glass?
Can the firs be captured in depth, from the bubbles of sap on the trunks to the tips of the branches?
Victor Gruen had his ideas too, but they were of a time. Gruen, like you, also assuredly used the future perfect continuous to make life easier and healthier for the users of buildings, but Gruen took his reference from the half-collectivised postwar masses. The spot where both of you imagined the tense would end was never found. Gruen, like you, had all those useful building blocks in sociology to guide him, oblivious to future decay: class, religion, bilateral global politics, the naivety of ideology and hope. Gruen sketched in ink and stabled the wild finned automobile. You sketched with a propelling pencil that craved being digitised. For both you and Gruen, knowledge happened away from consumerism. The very idea that consumerism might become everything was, quite understandably, unthinkable, unknowable, lacked form and was inelegant.
There’s one hardwood tree in the drawing and it’s centre stage, identifiable by its classic treeness. This is the mythologised tree, almost walking forward to sing an aria, perhaps about its role as a tree. This is the individualist tree, the one for sale, so favoured by the modern consumer of nature. They’re felling the conifers now that they have reached maturity and, rather than use the labour of man, are using huge machines to do it. The firs weren’t just planted to provide wood, they were also planted to provide jobs. When the Forestry Commission planted them they could not have predicted this.
Cantilevers are fetishised, so it will not be cantilevered.
Even decking is cantilevered now.
We will dig out the bank and create a Ha-ha.
Our building could be like a pillbox.
So it would be permanent and monolithic.
It would transcend.
No one could have imagined this internal life developing from the postmodern turn, like a forest blaze, leaping across the fire roads and rendering good theories preposterous. And to be stuck under the weight of the shear number of branches, pinned to the forest floor with only an analogue paddle to quell the flames is no place to be. Moving and adapting buildings and landscapes works when we think in societies, but it cannot be done otherwise. The truth is that the keys to the drawing board have slipped out of the hand of dreamers and been placed into the hands of those that get things done. Architecture adapts to elites: would you still be elite? Would you want to be?
And then there’s The Stalking Eye which in my heavy hearted imagination resembles the tower of a numbers station or the antennae of a Royal Observer Corps nuclear monitoring post. Like the whole drawing, this non specific object bathed in yellow light is there to be anything the viewer wants it to be. This drawing is a work that could only exist when the imagination was in primacy and so is generous and welcome; but it is anachronistic. In this garden where nothing much happened, the whole world of architectural possibility was created. For me The Stalking Eye is what was never there and could never have been there. This object is the act of knowing. It is knowing how one’s own views and first principles might be formed in a state of total oblivion as far as the future is concerned. Buildings and landscapes may well be torn down, re-purposed or never built at all, but motive is and always has been at the heart of the matter. The motive for change has become so atomised as to be rendered meaningless. I do not intend towards The Stalking Eye; I intend towards the FIR.
Our building will stand regardless of how it is perceived.
It will offer service and sanctuary to all based on its extant form.
It will be similar to nature itself; albeit a weak and mediated facsimile.
This building represents the past, present and future and therefore is timeless.
It can represent anything anyone wants,
But will not be anything other than the thing it is.