Letter to Marin IJ "Marinwood Fire needs to merge with other agency"

Marinwood Fire needs to merge with other agency

Marinwood Fire Department should be merged with another agency, period. We pay way too much for too little fire service. Each month our Marinwood firefighters are responding to emergency calls in San Rafael, and Marinwood taxpayers are footing the bill. We are essentially a substation for San Rafael but get paid nothing in return for 50 to 66 percent of all emergency service calls.

It gets worse. In 2011 Marinwood passed Measure E, which was supposed to give us a paramedic from San Rafael Fire Department to be stationed in Marinwood. Due to labor issues this has never happened and we have been paying the tax for seven years. Marinwood CSD has done nothing to address this rip-off on behalf of Marinwood taxpayers

A better solution for all parties, most especially the firefighters themselves, is to merge Marinwood Fire with a larger agency or convert to a semi-volunteer department. A merger with San Rafael would create better career opportunities for firefighters; San Rafael will have more resources to deploy and Marinwood could concentrate its limited resources to parks, open space and recreation.

Why not contract our fire service just like we do with county sheriff for policing services? The new agency can stay in our fire station and keep the same staff. Just change the lettering on the fire truck and hardly anyone will notice the difference.

— Stephen Nestel, Marinwood

A Plague on Cities, and the PoorBrutalism’s enduring influence

A Plague on Cities, and the PoorBrutalism’s enduring influence

Catesby LeighSpring 2018
Cities


The 24-story Grenfell Tower in London, where a voracious fire that started in a fourth-floor refrigerator took 71 lives in June 2017, was what the British call a tower block, anchoring a housing project with three low-rise “finger blocks” extending from it in a grassy, fenced-in compound. Topped off in 1974, toward the end of a massive postwar housing-construction campaign, the original tower was a Brutalist concrete hulk with the familiar sterile, diagrammatic array of horizontal window strips. The tower recently had been given a shiny new exterior cladding that converted it into a high-rise firetrap.

Now awaiting demolition, Grenfell’s scorched cadaver is a grim reminder that legions of Britain’s modernist housing projects turned out to be newfangled slums that hardly improved on the old row-house slums demonized by planners and architects. Tower blocks and high-rise slabs—the slabs often inspired by Le Corbusier’s quintessentially Brutalist Unité d’habitation (1952) in Marseilles, an exotic rectangular structure raised on bulky stilts, or pilotis—proved particularly inhospitable to their lower-income inhabitants. These buildings’ ill-conceived designs and often shoddy construction facilitated everything from vermin and black mold infestations to rampant criminality. Many of the 4,500 government-subsidized tower blocks erected by 1979 have been demolished.

Ironically, the Grenfell fire occurred amid a wave of Brutalist nostalgia among British “creatives”—a parallel universe of artists, architects, graphic designers, art historians, and critics, along with the developers, PR types, and upwardly mobile professionals keeping their company—and on the heels of numerous book-length paeans to Brutalist buildings in Britain and elsewhere. With titles including This Brutal World, Concrete Concept, Raw Concrete, and Concretopia, these British productions serve as reminders that the Brutalist sensibility, epitomized by the histrionic structures that Le Corbusier erected during the 1950s and 1960s in béton brut—“raw,” rough-textured, exposed concrete—never died.

The most exhaustive and wide-ranging of the recent books is Elain Harwood’s Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945–1975, published in 2015. The very heft of Harwood’s ponderously oversize (measuring ten by 11½ inches), 703-page tome reflects the eagerness of elite institutions to bankroll the historical vindication of cultural dysfunction. Her magnum opus was published by Yale in association with Historic England, the governmental consultant on preservation that employs her, for the university’s Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. Sumptuously illustrated with James O. Davies’s color photographs, Space, Hope and Brutalism runs the gamut of building types, from courthouses to gas stations. Many of the buildings that Harwood covers are glassy, boxy structures that are modernist but not Brutalist; she presumably included “Brutalism” in her title to generate more buzz.

The book is prodigiously researched. Harwood’s introduction to her chapter on churches, providing historical background on British religious life before and during the period she covers, is magisterial. Her architectural commentary, by and large, is not.

World War II left Britain in urgent need of rebuilding. The Blitz destroyed 200,000 homes and left another quarter-million uninhabitable. In the severely overcrowded urban slums, often blighted by industrial pollution, families lived without indoor plumbing, and they shared outdoor privies with neighbors. Others found shelter in temporary prefabricated homes produced by the aviation industry. In 1946, the government legislated the creation of new towns that, along with extensions of existing ones, would eventually be home to more than 2 million Britons. Aside from the new towns, a multitude of urban renewal and greenfield-development schemes emerged during the economically vigorous 1950s and 1960s. Housing “estates” erected by city and other local councils, mainly for lower-income residents, sprang up at a vertiginous rate, along with new office buildings, civic centers, shopping centers, parking garages, schools, hospitals, factories, and university buildings. Some 1.5 million prewar homes were demolished in the three decades following the war. Old urban centers were transformed: “Post-war Birmingham rebuilt itself in austere raw concrete, like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila,” Christopher Beanland enthuses in Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings Around the World. But by the late 1960s, it was obvious that most Englishmen weren’t keen on the idea of Birmingham looking like Kuwait and Hanover and Manila.

In her quest to redeem England’s generally dismal postwar architectural output, which she deems “as valuable as any in our heritage,” Harwood obscures as much as she reveals. What she has given us is less a history of postwar English architecture than of postwar English modernism’s greatest architectural hits, with major disasters conveniently excluded or glossed over, if not miscast as achievements.

The first indication that Harwood is on the wrong track comes in her preface, where she refers to the “hopes engendered by Clement Attlee’s Labour governments of 1945–51”—hence the “hope” in the title, which itself plays off the title of Sigfried Giedion’s hoary modernist gospel, Space, Time and Architecture, first published in 1941. The inevitable profession of faith ensues: “The values of the Welfare State [as envisioned by Attlee and his cohorts] formed me and I grew up believing that they would last forever. This book explores the framework of that belief as expressed in the architecture” of the postwar decades. Harwood is telling us that she does not regard architecture as an autonomous art, to be appraised on its own terms. It can be justified, to a significant degree, by good intentions—as a by-product of a progressive political ideology.

This fallacy underscores the unpleasant reality that in England, as in the United States, the poor routinely served as guinea pigs in welfare-state housing schemes that were part and parcel of what Norman Mailer denounced half a century ago as a “totalitarian architecture [that] destroys the past,” leaving its victims “isolated in the empty landscapes of psychosis.” Those with the least say in determining where they would live found themselves relegated to habitats that served not only to isolate but also to stigmatize them. Harwood fails to give this reality due emphasis, which is odd, considering that of the three pillars of the postwar British welfare state—nationalized medical care, expanded educational opportunity, and council housing—only the last crumbled. A couple of decades after Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 electoral victory, its share of the national stock had shrunk from more than one-third to one-eighth.

Harwood acknowledges an important phase of critical reappraisal as postwar architectural adventurousness, along with socialist “hopes,” withered under “the cold light of Thatcherism”—but her survey suggests that Britain’s cultural elite has consigned that reappraisal to oblivion. She barely mentions Prince Charles, though his 1988 BBC documentary, A Vision of Britain, along with the superbly illustrated book version published the following year, represented a frontal attack on postwar modernism, offering a traditional take on architecture and urbanism that resonated with the public. The prince’s vision has since been fleshed out in a superb new community, Poundbury, that he commissioned outside the city of Dorchester. Poundbury offers a compelling alternative paradigm to Brutalist dystopias and the commoditized suburban subdivisions that developers started plopping down in the 1930s.

Like many Brutalist projects, Mondial House—a mutant eight-story ziggurat clad in bright white plastic on the Thames’s north (ARCHAEO IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)



Many of the buildings that Harwood’s book covers make you wonder whether it is really about architecture at all. Consider Park Hill (1961), a huge council-housing estate containing nearly 1,000 duplexes and single-level flats that partially replaced a demolished slum overlooking downtown Sheffield—a crime-ridden precinct that, for all its problems, had housed a resilient community. Laid out as four long, interconnected slabs inflected so as to form an utterly antiurban, vermiculated footprint, Park Hill owed an enormous debt to the Unité d’habitation. At every third story, it featured elevated open-air “streets” or “decks”—the Corbusian fetish of the day—that ran indoors and out, connecting the slabs. As at the Unité, the imagery was nakedly industrial, with the apartments stashed in a “bottle-rack” grid of concrete that soon assumed a depressingly drab tincture and also proved prone to spalling. A ruthless rationalism likewise asserted itself in the level height maintained throughout the complex, which ranged from four to 13 stories, despite the irregular, sloping site. Park Hill was less a work of architecture than a huge, strange contraption inflicted on the urban skyline. Visual amenity, such as it was, came in the form of soft-hued brick within the concrete grid.

As with many postwar housing projects, Park Hill offered practical amenities that residents had never before enjoyed: indoor plumbing, hot water, mechanical heating, even a sophisticated garbage-disposal system. Harwood mentions that, Britain’s many council-housing catastrophes notwithstanding, Park Hill “stood firm.” This is not true. By 1979, less than 20 years after its completion, Park Hill was an urban basket case—riddled with graffiti, terrorized by hooligans, afflicted with irruptions of black mold and the terrible stench resulting from waste-disposal blockages. Deserted decks and stairways provided criminals with multiple escape routes.

An even larger housing complex situated farther up the hill, Hyde Park, degenerated much more quickly. Completed in 1965, Hyde Park was designed along the same lines as Park Hill—though its gargantuan, long-since-demolished 18-story slab, Block B, presented an even more forbidding sight. Hyde Park, which Harwood mentions only in passing, immediately became known as a problem estate. In 1979, it had its day of infamy when a television set tossed off a balcony fatally struck an eight-year-old girl.

Local journalist Peter Tuffrey’s Sheffield Flats, Park Hill and Hyde Park: Hope, Eyesore, Heritage—whose title might seem to play ironically off Harwood’s but for the fact that the book appeared two years earlier—allows us to study a map and old photographs of the slum that Park Hill and Hyde Park supplanted. What we see are blocks, courts, and alleys teeming with row houses and low-rise tenements—streetscapes displaying a human scale, much solid construction, and considerable dereliction, all to be swept away by the desolation of the Corbusian superblocks.

Harwood doesn’t trouble herself with the Hulme Crescents (1972), another assemblage of concrete slabs on the vermiculated, “streets-in-the-sky” plan that rose from the blank slate of a demolished Manchester working-class district where 90,000 people once lived—“the human engine-room of the Industrial Revolution,” as Lynsey Hanley calls it in her largely autobiographical and often engrossing Estates: An Intimate History. The Crescents, designed to house more than 13,000, were conceived in emulation of Bath, the gorgeous Georgian city. Things didn’t work out that way.

“Almost immediately, the estate’s infrastructure began to suffer from the same problems that beset Park Hill and Broadwater Farm [a troubled north London estate]: leaky roof membranes, infestations of vermin and insects, uncontrollable damp, deserted walkways, and an endemic feeling of isolation,” Hanley notes. “The flats were so expensive to warm that many tenants never turned the central heating on, and communal areas were so difficult to maintain that the [city] council could not cope. When a small child died after falling off the top-floor ‘access deck’ of one of the Crescents in 1974, families decamped to the outskirts, belatedly following the rest of old Hulme.” The Crescents’ descent into chaos did make it possible for an anarchic punk scene to flourish in an upper-level hangout known as The Kitchen. The party ended with the estate’s demolition during the 1990s.

The Lancaster West Estate anchored by Grenfell Tower is a smaller-scale superblock. Its creation nevertheless entailed elimination of several streets. The result was a pocket of crime and deprivation in London’s now-gentrified North Kensington neighborhood. In debunking such schemes in her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs highlighted the crucial importance of the traditional city street—tidy-minded modernists’ bête noire, due to its untidy juxtaposition of vehicular and pedestrian traffic—to the survival of civilized life in economically stressed neighborhoods like the old Park Hill or the North Kensington of half a century ago. One wonders just how often slum clearance of old row-house blocks, which might have been renovated to include modern conveniences—“mod cons,” as the Brits call them—was a wise idea.

Harwood doesn’t try to pin the widespread failure of low-income housing projects on Thatcherite cuts in maintenance and security budgets, the knee-jerk leftist explanation. She shows that postwar housing initiatives were being widely questioned a decade before Thatcher came to power. And she acknowledges that modernism never made a dent in the characteristic English aspiration to a house with a garden. People on their way up in life, especially if they were intent on raising families, were never likely to remain in high-rise council housing, no matter how well maintained.

Still, the folly of concentrating lower-income populations in tall buildings eludes her, just as it eluded the Tory government that, in 1956, introduced hugely generous subsidies for the construction of high-rises, relative to row houses and semidetached houses. Not only are tall buildings much more expensive to build and maintain than houses; they were not even essential to achieving the residential densities that postwar planners sought. Tall buildings are highly artificial and complex structures housing temperamental machines, like elevators, that require a heightened degree of maintenance, often by highly paid technicians rather than handymen with toolboxes and stepladders, as Hanley observes. Tall buildings also require an elevated degree of social discipline, as well as security features like intercom systems, closed-circuit TV, and doormen or concierges. The tower blocks and high-rise slabs at the Barbican Estate, the carefully developed, elaborately landscaped, intensely picturesque Brutalist “bankers’ commune” in the City of London, have been very successful. The appropriate synecdoche for the Barbican’s low-end counterparts, however, might well be a broken-down elevator littered with trash, defaced by graffiti, and reeking of urine.

Park Hill surely fared better than Hyde Park for a time because it was a high-priority model project. “Community development officers” saw to it that old neighbors were relocated next to one another and helped them settle in. Twelve caretakers lived on-site and were on call around the clock. All very nice, all very expensive, and all thoroughly unfeasible on a large scale. Social breakdown at Park Hill and elsewhere involved original tenants being replaced by increasingly “antisocial” elements. Viable council-housing populations became harder to find in Britain as employment in factories and mines declined, a process that accelerated during the 1970s and 1980s.

Government funding cuts under Thatcher intensified the estates’ decline, as did rampant drug abuse—heroin and, later, crack cocaine. But the decisive blow to council housing was Thatcher’s popular Right-to-Buy program, launched in 1980. It allowed tenants to buy their homes at a steep discount and, in due course, lease or sell them to third parties. Councils were forbidden to use the proceeds to build new housing or even improve their existing stock. This led to a much larger role for nonprofit housing corporations, to which many councils transferred some or all of their estates—a process actively encouraged by Tony Blair’s Labour government after his election in 1997. In redeveloping ex-council estates, nonprofits have used the sale of homes on the open market to help subsidize “social” housing. (The policy sea change has not prevented a housing shortage that is particularly acute in southeast England, starting with London.)

A curious variation on this redevelopment theme is unfolding at Park Hill. The estate was landmarked—or “listed,” as they say in Britain—by the government in 1998. According to a British architecture critic, Harwood was instrumental in its designation. A poll taken by Sheffield’s daily newspaper, the Star, showed the public opposing the listing by a factor of seven to one. The city council, hopeful of attracting a buyer, felt otherwise. The city, however, wound up handing Park Hill over to a hipster redevelopment outfit, Urban Splash, for free. And for the complex to be economically viable, it had to be significantly altered, not submerged in the familiar preservationist formaldehyde. The first portion to be redeveloped has gotten some sparkle in the form of shiny aluminum metal panels tinted red, orange, and yellow, supplanting the old brick infill. Interior decks have been narrowed, and apartment windows now look out on them, an obviously necessary security feature that the original design lacked. More than that, key fobs are now needed to access the decks from the ground level. Plans for the remaining redevelopment, to be completed in 2021, include student housing and a $29 million artists’ colony featuring apartments and studios, research facilities, a gallery, shop, and café, and a sculpture garden. Originally conceived as a city on a hill for working-class Sheffielders, the new and improved Park Hill will be a predominantly market-rate safe space for creatives. It is not the only ex-council estate experiencing such a transformation.

In addition to architecture that reflects a socially progressive agenda, Harwood focuses on technologically progressive architecture, as if the two went hand in hand. She is intrigued not only by buildings that incorporate new materials but also by those that incorporate industrial processes of production, especially new prefabrication systems, or even the look of consumer products.

The reader is thus treated to endless references to new systems, techniques, and materials as well as their manufacturers: Bison, Chisarc, Freyssinet, Magnel-Blaton, Zeiss-Zywidag, Wallspan, WindowGrid, prestressing, post-tensioning, space frames, Vierendeel trusses, gunite, Galvatite, Vitrolite, Forticrete, CorTen, neoprene, glass-fiber-reinforced polyesters (i.e., plastics), and so on. Harwood includes all manner of space-age nomenclature, with rudimentary window transoms transformed in architect-speak into “photobolic screens.” The 70-acre Aylesbury Estate (1977) in the London borough of Southwark, one of the largest public-housing complexes in Europe, soon became a national byword for urban mayhem. But Harwood merely refers to it in connection with large-scale deployment of the 12M Jespersen prefabricated panel-construction system.

Of course, new materials could accentuate the “wow” factor in new buildings. Mondial House (1975), for example, was a mutant eight-story ziggurat clad in bright white plastic. Perched on a deeply shadowed podium at a high-profile London site on the Thames’s north bank, it was built by the post office as an attention-grabbing structure housing a major telephone exchange. “[I]t was likened to the adding machines and Polaroid cameras popular at the time,” Harwood writes. And, like that of Polaroids, its shelf life was limited. It was knocked down in 2006.

Experiment with prefab systems, on the other hand, was inevitable where crash programs of postwar baby-boom home and school construction were concerned. But new materials and systems have their sinister side, especially when official corner-cutting and incompetence come into play, as they all too often have in the annals of Britain’s council housing. All indications are that the Grenfell Tower fire, currently the subject of an official inquiry, is a historic case in point. The building’s original cladding consisted of prefab concrete panels, which contributed to its drab appearance and provided inadequate insulation. Not long before the fire, a cheap, colorful new cladding was grafted on, its main components bearing the usual space-age trade names—Celotex RS5000 and Reynobond PE. Insulation foam that emits a toxic combination of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide fumes when it burns was attached to the original panels. A narrow ventilation cavity separated the foam from a thin “rainscreen” veneer, a panelized sandwich cladding with aluminum on each face and a polyethylene core. The cavity functioned as a chimney during the fire, but the rainscreen’s core as well as the insulation foam was flammable. The fire therefore swiftly engulfed the exterior of the building.

It’s not a new story. While “visionary” architects and planners were selling council officials on the idea of leveling down-at-the-heels neighborhoods to make way for the towers and slabs, developers sold them on cheap prefab building systems that required a minimum of skilled on-site labor, which was in short supply during the postwar decades. An epidemic of substandard construction ensued. The most notorious case, prior to Grenfell Tower, was Ronan Point in east London’s Canning Town. Here the Danish Larsen-Nielsen system of prefab, reinforced-concrete panels was employed half a century ago in the construction of eight towers, or “points”—including Ronan—over 20 stories high, though the system was not designed for buildings taller than six. Incredibly, though load-bearing, Ronan Point’s panels were connected to one another by nothing more than a few bolts, which promptly began to rust because joints weren’t even sealed. A kitchen gas explosion early one morning in May 1968 left Ronan, which had been completed only two months earlier, looking as if it had undergone a partial renovation by Frank Gehry, with a stack of living rooms collapsed on one another. Thanks to the early hour, the death toll was limited to four.

Elsewhere around London, the demolition of Euston Station and its magnificent gateway, Euston Arch, prompted an uproar similar to that caused by the destruction, also during the 1960s, of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York. Euston dated to the 1830s and 1840s. In addition to the arch, its majestic Great Hall had a civic status akin to that of the old Penn Station’s general waiting room. Harwood doesn’t mention the uproar, let alone the enduring unpopularity of the hopelessly banal new Euston Station that was completed in 1968. Meantime, large-scale redevelopment to accommodate offices, housing, and a shopping center at a historic south London crossroads, Elephant and Castle, was widely regarded as a failure, with the road-ringed shopping center a beached whale afflicted with poorly designed pedestrian access. Mandarin planner William Holford’s reconstruction of Paternoster Square next to St. Paul’s Cathedral was another architectural dud, done away with in a matter of decades.

Thankfully, proposed urban-renewal schemes came to naught at familiar London venues like Piccadilly Circus, Covent Garden, and, last but not least, Whitehall—where Cambridge architectural eminence Leslie Martin humbly proposed to demolish everything standing between the Palace of Westminster and Downing Street, including Gilbert Scott’s Home and Colonial Office and Norman Shaw’s Scotland Yard, to make way for a mini-Brasília. The sensibilities excited by such ill-conceived schemes were nakedly elitist—another crucial issue that Harwood acknowledges only in passing.

After Ronan Point, funds for urban redevelopment and ambitious council-housing projects became scarcer because of a worsening economic climate. Support within the political establishment was drying up, too. An active preservation movement had arisen in town and country to resist the rampant destruction of old buildings. Slum dwellers insisted that their neighborhoods be rehabilitated, not demolished. Modernist architects were increasingly seen as arrogant types bent on inflicting repellent structures with leaky flat roofs on their client-victims.

It wasn’t long before architectural historians and critics were writing books with titles like The Rape of Britain, while a popular 1970s novel portrayed a middle-class descent into savagery in a brash new London high-rise. Stanley Kubrick employed a system-built concrete housing development outside London, Thamesmead South, as an empty landscape of psychosis for A Clockwork Orange(1971), his cinematic version of Anthony Burgess’s novel about a violent gang of bowler-hatted thugs in a strange new Britain. More recently, widely publicized polls dubbed “Crap Towns” and “Demolition” have allowed the public to vent its resentment of the nation’s architectural disfigurement—epitomized, Hanley notes, by a rogues’ gallery including Park Hill; Birmingham’s Central Library (1973, demolished 2016), an upside-down concrete ziggurat that, in Prince Charles’s words, looked like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept”; Portsmouth’s Tricorn shopping center (1966, demolished 2004), a forbiddingly discombobulated Brutalist colossus; and a bizarre Cubist assemblage of concrete blocks, the open-air “Apollo Pavilion” (1969), bestowed on culturally hidebound miners in a County Durham new town who found themselves housed in badly built, flat-roofed cubes.

Now demolished, Birmingham’s Central Library looked, in Prince Charles’s words, like “a place where books are incinerated, not kept.” (JOHN JAMES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO)



Harwood divines a link between waxing animus toward modernist architects and waning support for “the technocratic welfare state”—which, of course, was a bipartisan, Labour-Tory phenomenon, at least prior to Thatcher’s election as prime minister. But maybe people just got fed up with lousy buildings.

The term “Brutalism” is a bit tricky. While it typically refers to concrete buildings inspired more or less directly by Le Corbusier, a fad called New Brutalism was heralded in Britain by a boxy, un-Corbusian school building of 1953 in the seaside town of Hunstanton, Norfolk. It was modeled on a Mies van der Rohe building at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Hunstanton school’s exposed steel frame, exhibiting an exiguous modernist take on classical proportions, is configured as a grid of rectangles successively broken down into infilling panels of brick or glass. The school qualifies as an excellent example of what the late Henry Hope Reed would call anorexic architecture. But what is brutal about it? Well, its factory-like exposed structure and pipes and freestanding, industrial-looking water-tank tower might have seemed a tad brutal back in the 1950s, though they’re old hat by now.

Brutalism’s common denominator was that it wasn’t about aesthetics but authenticity. What is authenticity? Whatever the au courant modernist happens to think is the real deal. “Authenticity” is, in fact, the most important word in the modernist lexicon. Unfortunately for millions of postwar Britons, it is a fairly reliable antonym for “beauty” or “domesticity.” Its modern roots lie in the separation of authentic or genuine artworks from fakes. So far as architecture is concerned, however, the term is totally subjective. Brutalism’s pathologically materialistic criteria for authenticity include the use of industrial materials and emphatic exposure not only of a building’s structural system but also of functional innards such as stairwells, elevator cores, ductwork, and so on. Yet Brutalism’s “much-vaunted authenticity was itself a species of artifice,” as John Grindrod observes in Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, “with schools, offices or houses ‘dressed up’ as factories, power stations or machines.” (Grindrod’s book—well researched, engagingly written, and generally misguided—is by far the best of the recent paeans to Brutalism.)

The Brutalist sensibility welcomed ugliness, of course: the more visually transgressive the structure, the more points for authenticity it was apt to score. England’s modernist buildings, however, have found a number of ways to be brutal. Skimpy construction has the rather brutal side effect of making the Hunstanton school “freezing in winter, boiling in summer,” as its caretaker informed Grindrod. There’s also the brutally depressing appearance of gray, dirt- and rain-streaked concrete buildings on those gray, wet British days, not to mention the brutal wind tunnels created by perching slabs on Corbusian pilotis, a practice that postwar architects pursued with neurotic insistence in Britain and elsewhere.

Incompetence can be brutal, too. Grenfell Tower and Ronan Point are reminders, and they’re not alone. In 1973, a fire at the Summerland leisure center on the Isle of Man took some 50 lives. Summerland, which had opened only two years before, was another Brutalist firetrap—clad in snazzy flammable materials including an acrylic plastic sheeting marketed as Oroglas. Then there was the 1960s residential complex built at the University of Surrey by a prominent modernist firm, the Building Design Partnership, which was “found too impersonal, attracting a high suicide rate,” as Harwood blithely informs us. It was replaced by buildings that actually looked like houses.

Modernism, as the British classicist Raymond Erith observed decades ago, defines itself in terms of what it is not—which is to say, not traditional—not in terms of what it is. It has accordingly pursued different avenues, some more worthwhile than others. Not all the modernist work in Space, Hope and Brutalismis bad. But the rate of aesthetic dysfunction in this book vastly exceeds that of an architectural culture worthy of the name. Nowhere does one encounter anything like a set of forms that would empower an architect to create a modernist equivalent of Bath, as the designers of the Crescents aspired to do. This is of no concern to creatives, who typically fail to see architecture as having anything to do with enduring forms. Not only are latter-day Brutalist enthusiasms in large measure a politicized, left-wing phenomenon, as architecture historian Barnabas Calder grants in his sometimes informative but more often overheated Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism; they are also sustained by a nihilistic post-punk emotivism typified by a hipster blog, F*** Yeah Brutalism—without the asterisks, needless to say. Hence the irony that perhaps the most visually engaging Brutalist complex in Britain, its trio of repellent high-rise towers notwithstanding, is that 40-acre “bankers’ commune,” the Barbican, erected between 1959 and 1982 on what was previously a Blitz-ravaged wasteland dotted with warehouses, an old church, and remnants of a Roman wall.

Perhaps the most visually engaging Brutalist complex in Britain is the Barbican, a 40-acre “bankers’ commune.” (Photo: F Fawcitt UK Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)



Though marginalized by Britain’s cultural elite, Erith and other traditional architects remained active in the postwar decades—despite the ongoing increase in the cost of labor and materials that was thought to necessitate modernist efficiencies such as industrialized building systems. This countercultural cohort gets some attention in Harwood’s book, but not enough. In terms of quality, if not quantity, traditional designers outshone their modernist counterparts in the categories of government buildings, academic buildings, churches, and council housing. Barriers confronting today’s classically oriented architects and urban designers include an elite culture that values “iconic” novelty and shock effect as ends in themselves, along with a financial culture geared to quick returns, rather than the “patient capital” required for the construction of humane as well as urbane buildings and neighborhoods that appreciate in value over the long term because they’re loved. Curiously, Britain’s big-name postwar architects have shown a pronounced tendency to reside in such traditional architectural settings, as if in defiance of the buildings they’ve inflicted on others.

Yet the mayhem continues. Like Manchester’s Toast Rack (1960), a vocational college building known for its concrete enfilade of parabolic arches, latter-day skyscrapers disfiguring London’s skyline, though exhibiting more glass, steel, and aluminum than concrete, have attracted their share of Brutalist monikers: the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater. It is a modernist commonplace that Brutalist architecture is going through the same phase of reevaluation that Victorian architecture did after a period of opprobrium. The eclectic, often picturesque architecture of the Victorian era, though, is part of the humanist tradition; it assumes its minor station within a historic continuum extending back in time for thousands of years. Brutalism summarily rejected that continuum, presuming to erect a radically dehumanized new architecture on the rubble of a demolished tradition. It had no interest in the visual logic of historic architectural idioms and no grasp of the functional and spatial logic of historic urbanism. For that reason, Brutalist nostalgia can only be regarded as a benighted, cult-like phenomenon. And any idea that a significant portion of the modernist buildings covered in Space, Hope and Brutalism warrants listing qualifies as a “mod con”—and not in the British sense of the term.

Catesby Leigh writes about public art and architecture and is a research fellow of the National Civic Art Society in Washington, D.C.

Six Reasons to Vote Against Bridge Toll Hike

Marin IJ Readers’ Forum for May 23, 2018

Six Reasons to Vote Against Bridge Toll Hike

Vote no on Regional Measure 3, the plan to add $1 per year increase in bridge tolls. Over six years, the tax won’t total more than $3, which may seem inconsequential. But it’s significant, like the alcoholic taking a little drink and sliding into addiction. Here are six reasons to vote no.

Big businesses in Silicon Valley, the ones pushing the measure, are building excessive office space which adds to congestion, without taking responsibility for making conditions worse.

Revenue from previous tax increases is rarely accounted for. A statewide 12-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase is generating billions of dollars, and the tax will increase by another 5.6 cents next year.

Bridge tolls and gas taxes place an unfair burden on people least able to afford them — gardeners, nannies and health care workers who commute across the bridges for low wages.

A regional tax undermines local jurisdictional authority and puts money and power into the hands of regional officials who are not directly elected, and therefore not accountable.

If Marin voted unanimously against the measure but voters in the South Bay voted for it, Marin residents would be saddled with the tax and the imposition of voters in the South Bay.

How is it fair for the Marin County Elections Office to include 22 pages in support for the measure, written by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission? Why not an equal number of pages in opposition? Who paid for propaganda printing and postage?

The measure doesn’t provide solutions but creates problems.

— Susan Kirsch, Mill Valley

Should Marinwood CSD reform our pensions like San Diego?

L.A. Firefighter Earned $300K in Overtime by Working More Hours Than Actually Exist

irefighter Earned $300K in Overtime by Working More Hours Than Actually Exist

Donn Thompson was paid for more than 9,200 hours of work last year. But there are only 8,760 hours in a year.

Eric Boehm|May. 21, 2018 1:45 pm


Tim Berger / Glendale News/Los Angeles Times / Polaris/NewscomLos Angeles firefighter Donn Thompson had a busy year in 2017. If his pay stubs are to be believed, he literally never stopped working.

Data obtained by Transparent California, a project of the Nevada Policy Research Institute, show that Thompson pulled down $300,000 in overtime pay during 2017, on top of his $92,000 salary. Over the past four years, Thompson has earned more than $1 million in overtime, according to Transparent California's database. Thompson's ability to work so many hours "boggles the mind," says Robert Fellner, director of research at the institute.

To earn that much in overtime pay, Thompson would have had to work more hours than actually exist in a single year. Either the highly paid firefighter found a way to stretch the space-time continuum or something fishy is going on.

Here's how the math breaks down. Thompson, like all firefighters in Los Angeles, works 2,912 hours every year. With a base salary of $92,000, that comes to an hourly rate of $31.60. That means Thompson would earn overtime pay at a rate of $47.40 per hour—that's one and a half times the base rate. But earning $302,000 at a rate of $47.40 per hour would require working more than 6,370 hours. Add that to the 2,912 hours he worked as a salaried employee, and you get more than 9,280 hours worked, despite the fact that there are only 8,760 hours in a year.

Thompson is probably taking advantage of contract provisions that boost overtime pay above the typical rate, says Fellner, though it's unclear for now how that affects the calculations. (Transparent California is awaiting more payroll datafrom the fire department.)

Cashing in on the Los Angeles Fire Department's generous overtime rules is nothing new for Thompson, who might very well be the highest paid firefighter in American history. A 1996 Los Angeles Times story highlighted Thompson as a prime example of what the paper called "paycheck generosity" at the department. From 1993 through 1995, the Timesfound, Thompson made $219,649 in overtime pay. At the time, the department was spending more than $58 million annually on overtime, an amount the paper called "budget-wrenching"; it far surpassed what fire departments in other big cities were paying. The Fire Department of New York, for example, at the time paid about a third as much in overtime.

In 2009, when the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the L.A. fire department's overtime budget had grown by more than 60 percent in a decade, Thompson was once again riding high. He had earned "$173,335 in overtime in addition to his nearly $100,000 base salary while working at Fire Station 19 on Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood," the paper reported, citing 2008 figures.

In 2014, when the San Diego Union-Tribune featured Thompson in a story about runaway overtime costs at California fire departments, he told the paper that he "basically lived at the station" and didn't go home very often.

"The first thing [people] think of is firefighters sitting around at the station, but they're not just handing out free money over here," Thompson said. "I'm working hard."

The Los Angeles Times found quite the opposite when it investigated overtime. In the 1996 article, the Times said most overtime hours are not connected to "fires or other emergencies. Instead, most of it goes for replacing those who are out because of vacations, holidays, injuries, training, illnesses or personal leaves."

While Thompson's payouts are certainly eye-popping, he's hardly the only firefighter in L.A. reaping huge taxpayer-funded earnings. During 2017, the Los Angeles Fire Department had 512 employees who cashed in with at least $100,000 in overtime pay, according to Transparent California. That's a tenfold increase over the 51 employees who got six-figure overtime pay as recently as 2012. Thompson was one of 26 employees to get at least $200,000 in overtime pay last year, when the department reported spending $198 million on overtime pay—a 74 percent increase since 2012.

Perhaps the only silver lining for the taxpayers is the fact that overtime pay can no longer be factored into pension benefits, a consequence of a 2012 pension reform bill signed by Gov. Jerry Brown. It is perhaps not surprising that a dramatic increase in overtime payouts began the same year Brown signed that bill.

Liberty and Private Property

by James D. Best

“The pillars of our prosperity are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.” Thomas Jefferson

The Founders were firm believers in private property rights.  In their minds, private property rights and liberty were intertwined.  Does this make sense?

Let’s go back to 1776.  At the time, we revolted against more than the British; we also revolted against Divine Right.  A short time earlier only nobility owned property and the great mass of humanity were serfs.  As this system withered, the common man developed property rights, and with property, gained political voice.  The Enlightenment preached that all men possessed God given rights, including the right to own property. By the second half of the eighteenth century, most British subjects equated property rights with liberty because they had seen that one followed the other.

In their view, prosperity and broad distribution of wealth depended on the protection of private property.  Even before the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Declaration of Rights led off with “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which … namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property.”

James Madison said, “The government is instituted to protect property.”

Some argue that a benevolent government should control property, because the government can distribute the fruits of ownership more fairly.  This sounds good, except that these proponents can’t point to a single good example.  Concentrated property ownership always inflicts oppression.  This is not black and white.  It’s a sliding scale.  The more private property is protected, the freer the economic system and the more liberty is enjoyed by the citizenry.  The more property and planning are centralized, the more liberty is eroded.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s feudalism, fascism, communism, theocracy, socialism, or even crony capitalism.  To one degree or another, liberty is eroded in all these systems.

The alternative to private ownership is to confiscate property through force of arms, taxes, or legislation and then place it in the hands of a few.  It doesn’t matter if the property is confiscated by bullies, warlords, or government.  It’s all the same.  Individual liberty is destroyed.  Here’s why:

1. The people robbed fight back, politically or physically. Those resisting the will of the government must be suppressed.
2. Government control requires bureaucratic judgment, instead of reliance on the marketplace. Bureaucrats always fail at this herculean task, but won’t give up, so the government ends up dictating more and more of the everyday life.
3. Miscalculations result in scarcities. Complaints and criticisms must be suppressed. Black markets and underground corruption are overlooked.
4. When events don’t go as planned, the government uses indoctrination—and worse—to create a common mindset. Leaders come to believe that if everyone has the greater good in mind, then everything will work as planned.
5. Concentrated power corrupts.

If government allows bullies to take what they want, anarchy reigns.  If government gathers up property unto itself, oppression reigns.

Spain provides a current example.  Until 2004, Spain was the “economic miracle” of Europe, with huge job growth, surpluses, and declining debt.  Then the Socialist Workers Party gained power. After only six years of progressive leadership, Spain is experiencing negative growth and unemployment is 20% (43% for youths).  The government has increased taxes, arbitrarily interfered in business, and blithely disregarded EU regulations.  Basic freedoms—like speech and religion—have been impaired.

Socialists never learn.

Government confiscation does not have to be at the level of Venezuela to erode liberty. In Kelo v. City of New London, the Supreme Court said government could take property from one private owner and give it to another private owner if it was for the public good. True liberty never allows the government to take a person’s property.  James Madison said, “It is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties.”

If private property enhances liberty, then wouldn’t equal distribution of property be even better.  No, the world doesn’t work that way.  Private property and free markets go together. Whenever you have free markets, some will build wealth faster than others.  The only alternative is to restrain the industrious, the inventive, and the entrepreneurial.  The result might be more even distribution of wealth, but there would be less wealth for everyone, including the government, due to decreased tax receipts.

Thomas Jefferson said, “To take from one because it is thought that his own productivity has acquired too much, in order to give to others who have not exercised equal industry and skill is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association: the guarantee to everyone of a free exercise of his hard work and the profits acquired by it.”

Property may not be distributed equally, but rights are. All men are created equal. James Madison said, “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”  He meant that even if a person owns nothing, he still owns his rights, which are the most valuable property of all.

Look around, and examine history.  The wealthiest countries have the most limited interference by government.  They enjoy free markets, private property rights, a large middle class, societal improvement, cleaner environments, and the people enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Founders were right.  Private property rights and liberty are intertwined.

James D. Best is the author of Tempest at Dawn, a novel about the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Marin County Open Space Maintenance Shed is a good example to follow. Its HUGE and it costs LESS than proposed shed for Marinwood Park

The Marinwood Park Open Space District Maintenance Facility at the open space between Idylberry and Lucas Valley Homeowners Association is a model of utility and function that Marinwood CSD should follow when building their new facility in Marinwood Park.  The sheds are simple metal prefabricated units with large roll up doors for easy access.  Such units are very inexpensive to construct and serve a vital function.  The metal is a dark brown and it is behind trees and and a wooden fence.  Most maintenance facilities in Marin County use this style building.   A similar

50 x 100 metal building can be had for $30k from numerous manufactured building suppliers.

The facility grounds are neat and orderly

There are many bays which allow easy access to tools and equipment.

The building is roughly 40' x 80' with tall sides. 

Shipping containers provide accessory storage 

Raw materials are neatly stacked on pallets, underneath green tarps and behind a fence.

A temporary office trailer has been added for inexpensive administrative space.

The tall building sides allow the construction of a mezzanine for extra storage.  Skylights provide natural light.

Five Minutes to understand the Basics of the Marinwood Plaza Toxic Waste Problem

Only a few drops of PCE can poison an entire pool.

The original "spill" reported in July 2013 was reported as "only a few pounds" by Geologica and the spill less than a few hundred square feet.  It is now estimated to be 1/2 mile to the East and we still not have full defined the plume. We estimate hundreds of pounds may have spilled since the business began in 1965.
Geologica is recommending only to remove a 10' x 10 x 15' deep section of toxic soil. The known plume is well over 500,000 square feet and they will only remove 100 square feet?  RIDICULOUS!

This is the size of "a few pounds" of PCE. It is about 1 pint or .47 liters.

The Geologica Remedial Action Plan is incomplete and relies on inaccurate and incomplete data for its recommendations.  Worse still, it does not have a start date which means that they are asking the board to permanently delay remediation until after a buyer is found. Meanwhile NO ACTIVE REMEDIATION has occurred since 2011 while TOXIC WASTE has spread.  This is not acceptable.

Tetrachloroethylene (Perchloroethylene)

127-18-4

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Hazard Summary-Created in April 1992; Revised in December 2012

Tetrachloroethylene is widely used for dry-cleaning fabrics and metal degreasing operations. Effects resulting from acute (short term) high-level inhalation exposure of humans to tetrachloroethylene include irritation of the upper respiratory tract and eyes, kidney dysfunction, and neurological effects such as reversible mood and behavioral changes, impairment of coordination, dizziness, headache, sleepiness, and unconsciousness.  The primary effects from chronic (long term) inhalation exposure are neurological, including impaired cognitive and motor neurobehavioral performance.  Tetrachloroethylene exposure may also cause adverse effects in the kidney, liver, immune system and hematologic system, and on development and reproduction. Studies of people exposed in the workplace have found associations with several types of cancer including bladder cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma.  EPA has classified tetrachloroethylene as likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

For a complete report see the EPA Website HERE

And of course there is the politics of Toxic Waste........

How to Hypnotize Someone without their knowledge.

A Sample Maintenance Garage for Marinwood Park. Price $10,970

Marinwood Maintenance Shed only $10,970 assembled on site.

Editor's Note:  Saw a sample landscaping shed that is assembled on site for $10,970.   While it is pretty plain,  It does give an indication of what may be available for our landscaping crew. It appears that this is being used as such.   I favor a more attractive design with windows and a finished office but this garage is a good starting point for discussions.  The building is approximately twice as wide as our office trailer and just as long. 

More Info HERE

Sample H1

Starts at $10,970
Free Installation & Shipping In Normal Service Area

Sample H2

Metal Garage - Four Car 4 Sample

• 24′ wide × 55′ long × 10′ leg height × 14′ peak height
• Sample Shows Additional Options:
  • 4 - 10′ wide x 8′ high roll-up steel garage doors in 55′ side wall
  • 1 - 36” x 80” walk-thru door in 55′ side wall
• Color
  • Top - Quaker gray,
  • Trim - Quaker gray
  • Sides - White

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  Sample H3

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  Sample H4

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  Sample H5

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  Sample H6

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  Sample H7

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  Sample H8

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  Sample H10