Will Self interview

Will Self is one of the UK's most prolific and high-profile writers, having authored over 20 books of fiction and journalism. Novels such as 'The Book of Dave' and 'Umbrella' have been met with critical acclaim, with the latter being shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.

Self has also been a long-standing public commentator on urbanism and the built environment, having released 'Sore Sites' in 2000, a collection of his column pieces written for 'Building Design' magazine, and 'Psychogeography' in 2007, a collection documenting his long urban walks exploring the psychology of place.

Self's latest novel 'Phone' draws to a conclusion his epic and highly ambitious modernist trilogy, and could well be his finest work to date.

Designing Buildings Wiki met with Self for a wide-ranging discussion that included the impact of new technologies on the contemporary built environment, architecture and the imagination, Grenfell Tower, squatting, the plight of Generation Rent, privately-owned public spaces, and much more. Not to mention, the building he'd most like to see demolished...

Will Self (WS):

It seems to me that CAD/CAM designing, and in-built algorithms that produce renders, are in exact parallel with the way GPS navigation systems give you masses of location and no orientation; everything is pinpoint accurate but de-contextualised.

My argument is that you can't judge the city by old aesthetic criteria or by outmoded philosophies - whether it's Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier, City Beautiful, or whatever - it's going to be inadequate for what becoming. Having seen what's become, what you first notice is that the signature buildings - the Rogers', the Gehry's - look like nothing, they're overwhelmed by the parametrics that surround them.

When these strange parametric bodkins started to pop up round here [Nine Elms, South London], I tried to reserve judgement, as everyone should with the built environment, rather than be tediously conservative about it. But with this density of new builds, it is actually starting to make the city look pretty awful.

WS:

Buildings for me are much more aesthetically powerful and emotive than two-dimensional images. I can be moved by a building in a way I'm seldom moved by a painting.

The built environment always presents itself as scale-able in some way, because of the intrinsic human perceptions of proportionality, and so on. What all these 'giant desk-toys' do is provide a far more banal approach to the idea of scale, which is that it all looks the same whether large or small.

As Claude Levi-Strauss said, 'alterations in scale always sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible'. Whether it's a map or a model, what do these giant desk-toys actually do, what do they make more intelligible? Surely only the non-human, or distorted human, source of their origin.

It's the loss of the human scale in the built environment that is most telling. The growth of Manhattan in the 1920s/30s wasn't the same loss because the way in which the buildings were scaled was still assuming the human unit. There's something about these new renders that chucks the human scale right out.

WS:

In all sorts of ways. My adult perspective is that, as garden suburbs go, it's about the best in the world, some of the design is fantastic. Of course, I didn't perceive it that way as a kid; the suburb - particularly when I reached my teens - was hellishly dinky and confined. But it did serve me with a very pure understanding of what Ebenezer Howard's original vision of the garden city was.

It left me simultaneously with an appreciation of Howard's idea in design terms, how green and walk-able a place could be, but also with a profound contempt because Howard's model was about self-sustaining, self-financing, self-capitalising, self-employing municipalities. He comes out with this late-19th century attempt to reconcile emergent socialism and capital interests, and of course he manifestly failed to do that.

Indeed, in social, economic and political terms, all the bowdlerised Howardian suburbs you see all over Britain, and which are still being built (a new Barratt suburb will be just as Howardian as Letchworth or the Hampstead Garden Suburb), are a conspicuous failure. So it left me with an acute ambivalence about suburban development in that way.

WS:

It's inevitably bound up with the profession; the old adage is 'most artists think they're god, architects know they're god'.

I remember talking to Norman Foster in that weird Bond-lair room at the top of the Gherkin - with its Pantheon-style oculus of plain glass. At the time he was doing the dome on the Reichstag and the GLA building, and he told me he had a pilot's licence to fly himself from Berlin to London and vice versa if he needed to. That must have given him a really god-like perspective cruising from one grand project to another across Western Europe.

Even if you say the architect should serve the community more, should be more grounded in the quotidian, there still remains something very god-like about the architect's role, so intimately connected to our being in the world, to Martin Heidegger's idea of what constitutes home - it just is a more powerful job in that sense than other jobs.

WS:

It's certainly connected with neoliberalism in the sense that place and space, the value of them in certain kinds of developed societies, exceeds the need to package them, unlike almost every other product.

If you think of architecture, under conditions of maximal neoliberalism, as simply the wrapping paper for space and place, then you don't really need to bother about the wrapping once things get to a certain value, there's no added value to the wrapping.

Again, it's to do with the privileging of location over orientation; the old saw-horse of whether a building is in a dialogue with its surroundings. In neoliberal conditions, where you have 'ultimate commodity fetishism', there's no need for any building to have a discussion with another building, it stands on its own value. And since its value exceeds its aesthetic or cultural load, it doesn't really matter what it looks like.

So I do think it's a function of extreme neoliberal conditions and I confidently expect it to blow up with the next crash to some extent.

WS:

Architecture isn't like other art forms, it's necessarily a social art. There is something very strange about that particular idea of the cladding being chosen to cosmeticise old social housing buildings, and of it being a very bad option - it was not a good insulator as far as I understand, it was there more for modesty purposes.

Then you extrapolate from that to the other 'barcode facades' and the cladding on the luxury flats, and you think - what's that hiding? What it's hiding is a complete lack of dynamism or invention or originality in terms of the relationship between form and function. So we've already said, under conditions of maximal neoliberalism, form follows finance utterly - so that's what the cladding is hiding. And that's an ugly thing.

You can see there how de-aestheticised the environment is overall, it's no longer the result of any real meaningful aesthetic choice, and at that point it becomes clearly meaningful to talk about morally bad buildings.

WS:

Frankly I am, I think they should take the fight where it belongs - with the Baby Boomers. If I were young now, I would be explicitly political about youth, I don't see why not. Your parents' generation ruined the environment and your chances for some sort of stability in this kind of economic dispensation.

I don't think there's anything wrong with organising some kind of political campaign around the rights of younger people, why not?! Jeremy Corbyn and Labour are doing it a bit, but they daren't do it wholeheartedly.

WS:

Thinking back to my own 20s squatting in London, I remember it was like this urban 'wiggle-room' that you could feel all the time. For a start, the city was depopulated, it had lost 1.5 million people between 1945 and 1965, so the city I grew up in felt quite empty.

To give one example, Old Street roundabout was surrounded by bomb-sites and abandoned warehouses! There was a sense of plenty of space, and the squats were part of that, these liminal spaces. But what can you do? The last loopholes in the law were closed about 2 years ago, and it's virtually impossible to squat anywhere now.

WS:

London will defy it eventually, the forces that will bust this freeze-dried city are going to be very powerful and disruptive ones. It'll have to be because it's vise-like at the moment, the way these economic tendencies, the commoditisation of space and place, are filling up the city and shutting it down.

It's like surveillance, which we would seem to care less about than any other country in the world. By the same token, I fear that people's argument is 'well, I don't notice the difference so why would it bother me..?'

What I try and do with the psychogeography course I teach at Brunel University is to disrupt that sense in younger people, teach them to smell the difference between a private-public space and a real public space, and start to actualise their subjectivity much more. Only techniques like that can really start to remove people from the 'man-machine matrix'.

WS:

Absolutely. Give me anyone for an hour or two and I can 'derive them' into a different perspective, I'm quite confident about that. It's remarkably simple to shake up and break the hidden ideology of the man-machine matrix. I'm not overstating it, I've never failed!

It's about claiming and reclaiming some of the background and semi-conscious data that you use in proper orientation. If you let your mind work you can find your way around quite easily actually.

WS:

Not under existing conditions of globalisation because it's a game of 'grandmother's footsteps' - when she turns round you don't want to be the one that's moving because you'll be out of the game. So who's going to move first?

The principle of betterment was undermined within 10 years of 1947. So even if the will was there to create it initially, the will to sustain the idea or adapt it simply wasn't. From the point of view of global capital, any move back towards betterment would be perceived as the derogation of the free market, and capital would suck out of the City like nobody's business.

WS:

I very much like Alasdair Gray's 'Lanark', it's a magnificent rendition of the imaginary urban realm that is co-extensive with the Glasgow that Gray knew. A more modern version of that is China Mieville's 'London's Overthrow', which is written as a kid's book.

Another is Stanislav Lem's 'Memoirs found in a Bathtub', which is all set inside the Pentagon after it has, in response to a preemptive attack by the Soviet Union, sunk down a massive shaft and travelled on a vast underground railway to somewhere under the rest of the States where it's become a self-enclosed castle-like bureaucracy. That's a very weird bit of writing about the built environment.

WS:

Unsurprisingly, I'm a fan of high-modernist and Brutalist architecture. Almost as much as Owen Hatherley, but without the socialistic nostalgia that he has for it. I was at the Cite Radieuse for the first time a few weeks ago and the beauty of the building actually made me weep.

WS:

Midhowe Burial Chamber on the island of Rousay in Orkney, where I've gone for many years to write.

On Rousay, which is called 'Little Egypt' by archaeologists because it has the highest density of Neolithic remains of anywhere in the world, Midhowe is the piece de resistance - it's perhaps 50 m long, the central chamber goes up to 4 m high, with a beautifully corbelled internal chamber.

You can really get the feel of what the structure would have been like 5,000 years ago when it was built by people who had an average lifespan of 19 years. It captures what you often feel in cities, which is that humans are much closer to the social insects than they dare allow. In a building like Midhowe you really see it because you can't imagine there was any plan sustained over the multiple generations that built the structure.

WS:

I might destroy St. George's Wharf, since I have to look at it every day, it's unbelievably vile. But I might save that and instead demolish Terry Farrell's MI6 Headquarters. Just for the hell of it, because it'd be a double-blow to the secret state and the awful built environment!

WS:

I'd like to see to St. Petersburg in general, I'd like to see Peter the Great's city. But there's millions of buildings that I'd love to see.

You can purchase Will Self's latest book 'Phone' here.

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[edit] Related articles on Designing Buildings Wiki

• Garden cities.
• Housing shortage.
• Interview with Kevin McCloud 2017.
• Interview with Kevin McCloud 2018.
• Interview with Tom Dyckhoff.
• Owen Hatherley interview.
• Peter Barber - interview.
• Psychogeography.
• Richard Rogers in conversation.
• Social housing.
• Squatting.
• The architectural profession.
• Vital Little Plans - book launch.

--Michael Brooks