Just up the road, its bright-cladded facade framed by the south-facing windows of my flat, the North Block of the Park Hill flats is fully refurbished and occupied. Walking on the newly-laid grit road that runs along its front most every day on my way to the railway station, or coming and going from town, its an important part of the lived urban experience, influencing how the world is viewed. New road lamps stretch up and lean across above. Red-painted and thin they create an arch along the rising hill crest that looks out over the city of Sheffield to the west, where a bank of square and oblong buildings, glass grids locked in concrete and steel, are markers of a state of mind.
Often there might be a resident or two walking down the incline from the entrance to the flats, where the quick-moving lifts drop and rise, or workers from the design offices on the two lower floors of the next block along, it's upper floor apartments not yet open for occupation. But mostly it's people crossing in front, walking down into town or back home to the undeveloped flats in the southern blocks or the shared houses beyond. New residents or not, the look, the ambience, is regular. We are everyday small-city people. Natives or immigrants, we wear the uniforms of our age - jeans, trainers, boots, hoodies, parkas, leggings. We keep our heads down, mostly, against the regular wind, the rain, and because often we're weary. With our bags of shopping, our freight of everyday anxieties.
We live in the world of small desire - the need to put food in our bellies, gain shelter from the cold, connect with others in our immediate communities of shared life. What we are not are the people projected by the marketers who sell the Park Hill project to potential buyers. In that bigger desire world there's a utopian future, where it's always sunny and dirt never clings to anything. Everyone is healthy, fit and freshly dressed in perfectly-fitting clothes, the render ghosts of an idealised dream. Provided for in architecture, embodied in structure and design - yearning made tangible. And the desire is always for a greater vision than can be accommodated by immediate reality. It's how marketing works. Our collective need interpreted and catered to, rendered in mocked-up photographs and drawings, accompanied by slogans and blurbs, the language capturing an overarching, driven ideal - “courageous, bold ambitious”, “a new beginning, a new vitality”.
The bright cladding of the re-built facade (the flats were gutted to their core structure) suggests the sunnier, exotica of the South of France, where utopian architecture like this has its signature building. And I'm aware that Park Hill has its roots in a metropolitan socialist vision of happy workers living together in affordable state-owned homes, and that the basic structure accommodated that dream (easy-access passageways and two-floored interiors imitating traditional dwellings), even as it insisted on modernist materials (concrete) and engineering (uniform grid, high-rise). And that today's vision is driven by a private ownership that adopts that dream and re-interprets it for a new utopia of young urban professionals, their high-tech skills forging a new world of globally-connected wealth creation. But just like the earlier dream, the current dream betrays an excess of desire, a psychological projection born of a commonly felt lack. All over theworld this is the urban environment we live in and the discourse we're sold. But reality always occurs in the present and is always mundane. The body insists on that even if the mind can't stop imagining something warmer, more comfortable, happier and meaningful.
I quite like the way the flats look. I like the new grit road. It's much better than the old pock-marked tarmac road that hadn't been improved in 50 years. I like the people that come and go. We recognise each other, nod, say hi. Like humans everywhere, we need to connect as we go about our lives. But there's a disconnect and a sense of exclusion from the visions the environment embodies. A newly-forged capitalist realism incorporates and replaces the old socialist realism in this iconic building, a site of contending discourses, but both of those ideals are realisms rooted in projected futures thought up by fantasists. The actual reality occurs in a permanent present, where we move across surfaces and under facades created for ghosts.
pic from here
some pics of the reality here
No comments:
Post a Comment