They can't all be winners, but we need bold urban design

Last week, the Guardian held a masterclass event in London on Writing for Cities which featured speakers Oliver Wainwright and Owen Hatherley, professional critics of architecture and the built environment.

While the event was geared predominantly towards amateur or up-and-coming writers and bloggers (who live and work in London), there was also plenty for those of us who work in the regional property PR sector.

Wainwright’s presentation in particular was an interesting insight into the thought processes and approach of a professional critic of architecture and urban design, particularly in terms of the developments that he felt reflected the lackadaisical attitude of many city planners.

This was represented by a slide showing a full two-page article written by Wainwright from an April 2014 edition of the Guardian.

Entitled ‘Horror Storeys: the 10 worst London skyscrapers’, the piece (which can be found here) outlines various designs that Wainwright scathingly brands as a ‘shiny blue cucumber’, ‘a stack of hard drives’ and ‘two oversized air ducts’.

Supposedly representing the very worst that the city has to offer, the article is the author’s personal portfolio of the grotesque, outlandish and undesirable examples of urban development to be found in London.

Vauxhall Tower: tall

I didn’t – and still don’t – agree with all of Wainwright’s selections: the 50-floor Vauxhall Tower (“liked a cigarette stubbed out by the Thames”) and Stratford Halo (“wrapped with dubious purple pinstripes and topped with a jaunty quiff”) are at least to me, not aesthetically unappealing.

And there’s the crux of the issue: design is always subjective. What I consider to be an epic monstrosity, the person standing next to me may see as the epitome of utopian splendour.

This is surely the great thing about the ongoing evolution of our cities; after all, shouldn’t it be the remit of architects – as with all artists – to push the boundaries of their craft and inspire debate and discussion through their designs?

Exterior of the Selfridges part of the Bullring

In Birmingham some of our most instantly recognisable, widely appreciated and now greatly loved buildings have come in the form of extravagant and unusual design. The mosaic of silver disks that form the façade of the Selfridges section of the Bullring, for example, is such an instantly recognisable feature of the Birmingham skyline that it is now visual shorthand for the city.

Likewise, the Cube is a fine example of a building that remains unfettered by the restrictions of an unimaginative mind and while it generated considerable debate when it was announced, it has now slotted into the city’s skyline like a cube-shaped peg into a cube-shaped hole.

Other examples of where the city has dared to roll the dice on a design include the new Library of Birmingham with its gilded fez of a rotunda perched on top of its stacked design, and Bournville College out at Longbridge, both fantastic and unusual additions to the city.

The plans that we’ve seen released this week for the delivery of the building to replace the brutalist almost window-free 103 Colmore Row on the corner of Newhall Street are also exciting, offering a contemporary soaring tower that will sit well amongst its classic cohorts in the Central Business District.

Admittedly, not every design that pushes the boundaries is a winner and dipping back into Wainwright’s article he and I clearly agree on the Odalisk hotel and serviced apartment scheme in Croydon, with its schizophrenic cut-and-paste facade. Ugh.

Clearly there is more at play here than just the aesthetic of a building: it needs to be considered within its wider context, how it impacts on existing buildings, its functionality and whether it is fit for purpose. But for the most part, the complaints and comments that we see raised from planning officers, bloggers and members of the public focus firmly on the façade. After all, that’s what you’re going to be looking at.

Interim public realm proposed post-demolition of 103 Colmore Row

It should be noted that Wainwright has also written a piece outlining what he feels are London’s 10 best high-rise additions to the skyline. As with its counterpart, there were a few inclusions in the list that resulted in a raised eyebrow, not least the Trellick Tower, a 31 floor residential building completed in 1972 that rears over the “prim terraced streets of Notting Hill”.

Praised for its clever design of arranging its 200 flats into a series of stacked ‘streets’, it reminded me instantly of an offcut from the Park Hill estate in Sheffield.

This stretch of concrete-and-brick squats on top of one of the city’s many hills, dominating the skyline above the city’s train station and my memories of my time at university in the city.

It just goes to show quite how subjective the matter is.

This blog originally appeared on the Core Marketing website.

My favourite soundtrack moments - Binary Sunset from Star Wars Episode IV

I distinctly remember being very young and getting a copy of Star Wars Episode IV on VHS from a friend of my dad's who was visiting us.

I was, naturally, mesmerised by the film; Darth Vader's ominous entrance; the mystical and mysterious Force; the Lightsabers; and of course the space battles (only many years later did I learn that Peter Cushing did all of his scenes wearing slippers...which does kind of soften the Empire's Nazis-in-Space aesthetic).

While a love of  Star Wars accompanied me throughout my formative years, it wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I really started to appreciate the film's score.

The big, chunky themes - the blaring horns of the main theme and the draconian, staccato Imperial March in particular - are pervasive through their sheer omnipresence. But it was the smaller, softer pieces of music that I came to appreciate the most.

Williams: Conducting

John Williams's scores are peppered with leitmotifs and the Star Wars franchise is a perfect example, with many of the characters and locations having their own distinctive themes. Princess Leia's and Yoda's themes are two of my favourites, alongside 'Binary Sunset', or the Force Theme.

Featuring early in Episode IV, this piece is played after Luke sees the full message to Obi-Wan Kenobi that Leia stored inside R2D2 as the Empire was boarding her Blockade Runner. Standing outside his aunt and uncle's farmstead, he watches Tatooine's twin suns setting.

Starting softly and played on lone brass, the melody swells to a crescendo of strings that never fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

So if you have three minutes spare today, why not give this a listen:

World War Zzzzzzz

I finally got around to watching World War Z last night and it's a perfect example of a paint-by-numbers zombie film packed with post-28 Days Later cliches.

The 2006 novel by Max Brooks on which this story is based feels like an entirely different entity, with so few similarities that it wouldn't be unreasonable for many casual observers to cry plagiarism.

Written in retrospect following the conclusion of the decade-long battle against the zombie horde, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Apocalypse was formed from a series of self-contained interviews with key characters who had taken central roles in the events of the preceding ten years.

It was well written, exciting and subtle, slowly building up the layers of the story to form a global view of the catastrophe as it took place. Using personal stories to tell a tale of global apocalypse developed strong bonds between the reader and the characters.

However much like those bitten by a zombie, nothing intelligent or all that interesting survived the conversion process.

The entire story rises from the grave as an undead slug-fest, peppered here and there with moments of what could be loosely considered exposition.

The formula is simple: after a hurried first act where we meet the Lane family, including former UN investigator, Garry, his wife and two daughters, we are thrown into the melting pot as zombies run amok amidst a traffic jam in downtown Philadelphia.

The family steals an abandoned RV, grabs some supplies from a supermarket, fights its way up a tower block and grabs a helicopter to take them to the United Nations flotilla out in the middle of the ocean. Garry is strong-armed into helping the UN find the cause of this outbreak and a potential cure, his family's place on the flotilla secure only through his assistance.

From here, the film relies on formulaic and seemingly entirely interchangeable set pieces, all of which involve Garry arriving at a location, the zombies attacking, Garry running away, Garry fighting a zombie, Garry going to the next location...repeat.

This is Garry running. This happens a lot. 

While some of the locations offered a sense of oppressive foreboding, they were by and large just reproductions of each other: contained areas with zombies in them through which Gerry at some point needs to pass.

The section on the AirBus was interesting but ultimately fatuous as it transposed Garry (plus zombie who had been hiding in the toilet...or something) from the ground to the air to - you guessed it - fight some zombies.

This melange of factory-produced zombie run-ins almost made me wish that something would come along and eat my brain.

This is a film that has little regard for anything that might siphon too much time away from scenes of Brad Pitt running away from stuff. That includes development of either plot or characters, with Pitt's wife and two daughters reduced to nothing more than mannequins, barely registering above set-dressing. The presence of these actors served to do nothing more than to tick the box for 'family in peril'.

The subplot involving their place on the UN flotilla hanging in the balance as everyone believes Gerry to be dead made almost zero impression, with their use as an emotional rock only really served to drag this film down into the realm of the entirely mundane.

"I warned you about those sunbeds, Hank. Didn't I warn you?"

Adding to this grating tedium, there was also never any sense that anything bad was going to happen to our Gerry. There was never a sense of peril. He was, after all, the nearly-invulnerable human being who survived waves of zombies, hails of bullets, nearby explosions, a plane crash and being impaled on a piece of shrapnel and then pretty much walked it off.

Good work, Gerry.

Brooks' novel didn't rely on or revel in the chaos of a zombie infestation; instead it focussed on the wider impacts, demonstrating the effects on long-standing social tropes of the devastating effect of the species being brought to the brink of annihilation. Some nations turned to barbarism, some withdrew entirely and some became theocratic.

I can see why the changes were made: the narrative structure of the book doesn't lend itself to a big screen conversion and would have needed to be made in more of a documentary style. This would have required thought on the part of the audiences, complexity on the part of the screenwriters, intelligence on the part of the director and ultimately, risk to the studios.

However much like those bitten by a zombie, nothing intelligent or all that interesting survived the conversion process. 

An original, more faithful script by J Michael Straczynski was apparently thrown out prior to the start of filming to make way for this unadulterated mess.  It was little surprise, therefore, to see that Damon Lindelof had been involved in the production, although only as a post-ampersand screenwriter.

Lindelof's portfolio reads like a resume of 'could have beens', including Lost, Star Trek Into Darkness and Prometheus, all of which were widely acknowledge as suffering from a number of issues relating primarily to plot.

Frankly, the most horrifying thing about this film was a clip of arch shitworm, Piers Morgan - complete with his pugnacious, fist magnet of a face - banging on about how the world was on the brink of collapse as part of a tired and tiresome montage of news reports played over the opening credits.

The fact that the UN's chief virologist and 'best hope of finding a cure' manages to shoot himself in the face within seconds of landing at the first destination on their world tour is a wonderful metaphor for this whole bloated, boring mess of movie.

I'm going to read the book again and try to avoid the two sequels that are apparently already in the works. 

Blazek was over the line, but there is a point to be made about LinkedIn etiquette

A two-part moral for the day: in a digital age, never put in writing anything that you don't want uploaded to the internet and get to know the etiquette of the social media platforms that you're using.

These are lessons learned in no uncertain terms by Kelly Blazek, the co-founder of the Cleveland Job Bank, an organisation set up to help job-hunters in the US city.

Last month, Blazek was contacted by twentysomething university graduate Diana Mekota, who had just relocated to the city and was seeking employment.

Having made an initial contact with the Job Bank, Mekota followed up by requesting a connection to Blazek on professional social network LinkedIn.  She received the following response:

Image via Imgur

While this is stunningly rude and overly aggressive, if you can slice your way through the rhetoric, Blazek makes a point; why should strangers expect to connect to your networks on LinkedIn?

Unlike other social network which require no real effort to build personal connections, LinkedIn is a professional platform and it takes time and effort to properly cultivate a robust, useful network of connections.

Once you have accepted on LinkedIn, they can view and contact your connections, creating the digital equivalent of photocopying your contacts book (kids, ask your parents).

Many LinkedIn users will have spent considerable time building their digital networks through real-world interactions, attending seminars, conferences and networking events and eating innumerable canapes.

Contacting strangers on LinkedIn is frowned upon, specifically because it enables them to mine your contacts without having done any legwork.  Worse still, they could sour relationships with both long-standing and freshly minted business contacts by dropping your name into their (potentially unwelcome) introduction.

If I receive a request from someone that I don't know, I send them back a short, polite request to remind me of how and when we met. Unsurprisingly, many of them fade into the online ether, never to be heard from again.

However, there is also a balance to be struck: if you completely shut yourself off from the prospect of engaging and connecting with strangers, then you might just miss that key opportunity to bring new business into your organisation, or miss the perfect job opportunity being offered by a recruiter.

As an addendum it should be noted that Blazek's pugnacious and surly response forced her to make a public apology, close her Twitter account and delete her blog posts as well as hand back her Communicator of the Year award, details of which can be found here.

Rant of the day: Welcome to a world of zero personal responsibility

The story on the front page of this morning's Metro (below) refers to an 18-year old girl who went out one night, drank 10 Jaegerbombs and then suffered a series of heart attacks that left her in a medically-induced coma for 52 hours.

While this is an unfortunate circumstance for the girl involved, Jayde "...is convinced that the caffeine in the energy drinks was to blame and is calling for controls on their sale".

She said: "I hope that people will think twice about drinking energy drinks. They could be deadly."

For the uninitiated, Jaegerbombs are made by pouring half a can of Red Bull into a tumbler, dropping in a shot glass containing a measure of powerful German aperitif Jaegermeister and then downing it as quickly as possible.

I like Jaegerbombs and have in the past gone a bit batshit crazy and had...let's call it several...in quick succession. 

However, Jayde - who by her own admission was out for about two hours - knocked back 10 Jaegerbombs. That's the equivalent of drinking FIVE CANS of Red Bull in two hours.

Considering that each can contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee (90mg), is it any wonder that she had an adverse reaction? That's like wiring a car battery up to your heart.

The issue here, however, is not that this girl was irresponsible - people who live in glass houses and all that - but rather that this is yet another example of a culture of zero personal responsibility. 

This is a trend that started probably a decade or so ago when the litigious US culture seeped its way over here.

I'm not really sure at what point it became acceptable for us to seek out a scapegoat for every unfortunate event that takes place in our lives, but this weasley attitude is nauseating.

Jayde had three heart attacks because she went out and chose to drink 10 caffeine-powered cocktails. No one - as far as I'm aware - put a gun to her head and forced her to drink them.

Yes, energy drinks can be dangerous if taken in quantities well above the threshold of moderation of indeed common sense, but then again, so can water.

Our lives are what they are because of free will. That's what makes it unpredictable and fun. But whatever the decision that you make, man up and accept the consequences.

And sorry, guys, but the excuse 'but I was drunk' doesn't hold water.

Here endeth today's rant.

Now do some work.

If we keep pushing the boundaries, how far will adverts need to go?

Please be advised: The content of this post - due to its nature - is graphic and contains images that you may find offensive. If you're squeamish, this may not be for you.

With a catchy post-folk soundtrack jangling in the background, a group of teenagers drive out to the beach for a day full of the kind of care-free frolics that make you want to return to those sepia-washed, halcyon days.

And then this happens:

This is the latest example of shockvertising – the intentional development of adverts that are designed from the ground-up to catch our attention.

In a society where we are constantly bombarded with advertising messages and promotions, we have become accustomed to tuning-out. How many of us now pay anything more than a perfunctory level of attention to commercial breaks on television, or the 10 minutes of product placement before a movie?

With the instant distractions that smartphones and tablets now offer us, advertisers are working harder than ever to secure a slice of our attention and shockvertising is becoming ever more prevalent.

Like a slap in the face, this medium is intended to wake us up from the perceived catatonia brought on by the hundreds and thousands of adverts that we absorb each year.

Traditionally the mainstay of government-sponsored public service announcements - such as those that remind us of the consequences of drinking and driving at Christmas or graphic images on cigarette packets – shockvertising pushes the bounds of social acceptability to breaking point (and occasionally beyond) in an effort to grab our attention.

This ad by D&G was banned for promoting gang rape

By focussing on taboos such as sex, violence, profanity, brutality or drug abuse, advertisers hope to have their messages recognised above and beyond the white noise background of advertising to which we’ve become accustomed.

Alongside the obvious shock value inherent in the grotesque, shockvertising can be less overt and more subversive, targeting established religious or political norms and challenging established perceptions.

The instigator of shockvertising, Italian clothing brand Benetton, covered many of these topics in their seminal 1980s campaign, which was the first to transgress racial and sexual lines.

The NHS's 'Get Unhooked' campaign drew huge numbers of complaints

But does shockvertising offer any additional value? Experts have been asking this same question for the last three decades with opinion still split.

Whilst some campaigns highlight broader social causes, such as human trafficking, child abuse or animal cruelty in an effort to engage public awareness, others are merely there to ensure that their product or brand sticks out in our memories.

This has been particularly prolific in (although not limited to) the fashion industry, with Benetton, Calvin Klein, Sisley and Dolce & Gabbana all courting controversy through their choice of adverts

Several have been deemed too much even for the increasingly calloused social sensibilities and banned outright.

A hugely controversial campaign from WWF

It is difficult to argue against any campaign that is creative, carefully thought out, well executed and which make people think about the realities of uncomfortable situations.

But with a rising tolerance to graphic images, has the advertising pool diluted the power of the shock advert?  

Is this the only way for advertisers to get their messages across and if this is the case, how far will they need to go in the future to register the same impact?

Perhaps the question should not be whether or not shockvertising brings value to a brand, but whether or not it should be used to sell jeans. 

This blog was originally written for Core Marketing. 

Facebook's growing pains are at least in part down to its parents

The above image has been doing the rounds of Facebook and bobbed into my newsfeed just in time for the site’s tenth birthday.

One decade and 1.2 billion active users later, the slightly seedy ‘who would you rather’ concept of thefacebook – comparing photos of female university students – has evolved into the digital juggernaut that is today’s byword for social media.

But Facebook is far from a faultless success story, with allegations of handing over users’ details to third party agencies (including the NSA), a failed bid to purchase zeitgeist social network Snapchat and dissatisfaction amongst users for exactly those reasons outlined in the graphic above.

I’m no Zuckerberg apologist but I find the aesthetic amends that have been made to the site relatively palatable. Facebook is a digital platform. It is part of the technological sphere and as a result will doubtless undergo a raft of iterations during its life; that is the nature of the beast.

What I intensely dislike, however, is Facebook’s ‘mother knows best’ attitude to what we should or should not be seeing. This video from Veritasium outlines the core issue - Facebook would like us to sponsor posts.
Obviously!

Perhaps of greatest concern to the site are the numbers of teenagers who are reportedly cashing in their social media chips and taking their business elsewhere, with one report going so far as to suggest that Facebook may have jettisoned three million US teenagers in the last three years alone.

For the majority, however, the threat to leave Facebook rings hollow. How many of us who are in our late twenties and early thirties – the genuine early adopters of the platform – would actually close our profiles?

I know of only a handful of people my own age who aren’t active on Facebook: one who is hiding out from the Russians – no, seriously, he is – and another who just doesn’t ‘get it’.

The truth is that we’re now hardwired into the Facebook experience.  People’s whole lives will soon be charted via their Facebook page, a portent of which has already come in the form of the little baby found at the very bottom of your timeline, marked ‘born’.  Creepy, no?

Where else would we go? No other social media platform offers the same level of flexibility that you can get from Facebook.  Twitter? Too short. Google+? Just for geeks. MySpace? No. Just…no.

While it has all the makings of a true vox populi, we have to remember that we don’t own Facebook. 

It isn’t ‘ours’ although it’s where we handle most of our social activities and store our photos. It belongs, in fact, to a group of shareholders and I’d wager dollars to doughnuts (or quids to croissants) that what they’re really interested in is ensuring that the ubiquitous adverts are continuing to rake in the funds.

And with the site’s revenues hitting £7.9 billion in 2013 (up 55%) and annual profits totalling £1.5 billion – that’s just over one dollar per user – I honestly don’t think that they give a shit whether we're seeing what our friends post or not.