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In the fold: How does beauty arrive in a place?
Rival schools of beauty have been pulling from one extreme to the other for centuries, like a child’s idea of driving. One thing agreed on, writes David Henningham, is that beauty emerges from foundational beliefs about how matter behaves.
Much is the pace of change in east London’s Dalston Lane that everyone who lives nearby carries two versions of it: what they see in front of them and memories of what it used to be. As soon as author Patrick Wright exits Dalston Junction station, I quiz him about his recollections of the area. "It’s amazing it’s still here;’ he says. This is not a rhetorical statement.
Dalston Square’s Barratt housing blocks might have replaced the Four Aces club where the Prodigy debuted in 1990, and the CLR James Library may have been relocated westward, but Wright is referring to the London Ringways plan of the 1960s (abandoned 20 years later) which would have seen Dalston Lane demolished.
Even a brief visit to the A-roads laid at Victoria Park and Brent Cross reveals how disastrous the Ringways scheme would have been for London. A set of interior city walls built against traffic, marooning neighbourhoods and bringing traffic fumes right to their windows.
Wright’s 2009 book Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London is a masterpiece, describing the forces contending with the "Baroque individuality" of London. Where most psycho-geographers are content to take a short walk and show you what isn’t there, Wright scores a line down Dalston Lane and proceeds to fold space on a grand scale. It’s as if the Blitz survivors, Turkish Leninist poets, Cypriot tailors and Caribbean shopkeepers keep the state of the nation out back.
Wright’s 2009 book Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London is a masterpiece, describing the forces contending with the "Baroque individuality" of London. Where most psycho-geographers are content to take a short walk and show you what isn’t there, Wright scores a line down Dalston Lane and proceeds to fold space on a grand scale.
Dalston Lane leads onto the high-rise Holly Street Estate, which looks on to the battle to save housing stock in Mapledene and Whitechapel, which passes on to the birth of the National Trust. Dalston Lane explains fashionable privatisation, Bow Quarter property speculation (with attendant innovations such as the triangular bedroom) and the founding of New Poundbury. All this is done without nostalgia or deference to received wisdom, yielding unexpected insights into the planning and preservation of cities.
I ask Wright about the illuminated Town Guide Cabinet mentioned in the opening of his book, which I’ve seen in the Hackney Museum. "That was over there,” he says, pointing towards Dalston Cross. This eccentric piece of street furniture is comprised of a colourful street map behind glass with arcade-game buttons that illuminate notable buildings.
We head east. Wright points out where the Free Form Arts Trust used to operate, one of the founding organisations of the 1960s Community Arts movement. We stop where St Barnabas church was demolished, leaving only a remnant at the corner, which has been turned into flats.
Back towards the station, past the new Allpress coffee roastery; past the Kurdish-Turkish community centre, we find the Dalston Eastern Curve Garden which occupies the site of the former train station. The garden was created in 2010 as part of Making Space in Dalston, a project commissioned by Design for London. Hackney Council and local residents and groups worked with muf architect/art and J&L Gibbons Landscape Architects to explore ways of addressing Dalston’s deficiency of public space. The garden’s pavilion and greenhouse was constructed by architectural collective Exyzt.
Since 2012, the garden has been run as an independent social enterprise funded by its cafe with core staff and many keen volunteers. We buy coffee from the kiosk in an open-timber shelter that I remember being built, especially the antique costume of one German journeyman. Settling at a table in the garden’s grove of birch and alder trees, a stone near our feet is the only clue to the railway tunnel beneath us that prevents building on this site. It is a beautiful place.
In October, hundreds of candlelit jack-o’-lanterns line its paths, attracting a queue of hopefuls seeking out the pumpkins they carved. Beyond the craft room and down a hill there’s a muddy area where children play, a brightly painted stage and a gate that leads to Kingsland Shopping Centre.
In 2021, Hackney Council gave the social enterprise an assurance that the oncetemporary Curve Garden was now safe from redevelopment. But residents remember the long battle that began in 2010 with the Dalston Area Action Plan (DAAP). The proposed "linear park" would have allowed a visitor to disembark at Dalston Junction, pass through the Eastern Curve Garden, and enter Ridley Road Market opposite the old sweet factory where Alan Sugar (appropriately) once made his computers.
But after the consultation in the shopping centre closed, Criterion Capital changed the plans to a "shopping circuit" lined with 14-storey apartment blocks. A few trees would be shoved to the side and an excessively paved meandering walkway added through the garden, like an obstacle course at a robot expo. There were assurances of a couple of raised beds for the community, but the garden would be taxidermied. Only a Dalstoner would be able to squint and see the old shape, the Curve Garden, alert and bright-eyed like a stuffed otter.
Local activists and Sainsbury’s opposed the plans and they fizzled out by 2014. In 2018, a 30m tower was approved next door, ending the prospect of a green corridor. The brief community testimony hardly inspired confidence in the decision-making process: at the public consultation, Brian Cummings, who co-runs the garden, said: "When the original plans for the DAAP were created, the garden did not exist so people did not have the opportunity to choose it over a pathway ... It does not continue to exist as a garden when it’s a walkway.”
How does beauty arrive?
The Curve Garden’s beauty made it a battleground, but what is it that has made the garden beautiful? The familiar, Classical idea of beauty is that of a pleasing arrangement of parts in proportion to the whole. As the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wcilffiin wrote in 1932: "The central idea of the Italian Renaissance is that of perfect proportion. In the human figure as in the edifice, this epoch strove to achieve the image of perfection at rest within itself."
Classicists would agree that beauty appears when things are right. They appeal to Keats’ Grecian urn - "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." In other words, you can take that Grecian urn to the bank; it’ll look nice up on the pediment.
What Modernism adds to this tradition is the marriage of form and function. An outburst from Buckminster Fuller towards a group of architects is recorded, looking back in his imagination from the other side of a climate catastrophe: "Architects weren’t doing anything! Running, sitting drawing pictures of the view saying ’I got pretty, that’s enough’. You don’t ever have to worry about beauty, because if you really understand your problem, if you solve it correctly, so life really goes on, and if you do it economically, it always comes out beautiful. That’s why a rose is beautiful ... You can’t miss beauty, your joy will be there.”
But there is another dissenting school of design. The Roman church supported the Baroque in the 17th century, looking for a counterblast to austere Protestantism. Popes and princes made their public spaces more theatrical, dressing geometric High Renaissance ideal cities with Baroque buildings. But their architects couldn’t overawe merely by overdecorating, they gave churches a pox of angels, outbreaks of ovals, arcadian abundance squeezed through reliefs like excess insulating foam. Instead of a symmetrical building standing for truth, Baroque buildings are about true love.
They take place in the minds of their inhabitants, whose attention is arrested and aroused as if lost tracing a misshapen shell’s detours. AB the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek noted, love is something we anchor to imperfections. Baroque passers-by are left "clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of all".
Yet Classicists don’t feel safe without their balance. These rival schools of beauty would pull from one extreme to the other for centuries, like a child’s idea of driving. But one thing they agree on: beauty emerges from foundational beliefs about how matter behaves. The Classicists imagine a Euclidean plane of placid geometric forms at rest. Modernists like Fuller begin with a vectorised curve composed of these same planes, stitched together by light years. But the Baroque begins from a proliferating abundance of pleated matter compressed in time and space.
The community of Dalston Curve Garden have already done what the Classicist considers the root of all evil; they have separated from the whole and attached themselves to an imperfection on their doorstep.
1980s Baroque
I'm in the Dolphin Tavern near London's Conway Hall, and I take an empty seat next to author and publisher Patrick Eyres. We've been on opposite sides of the Small Publishers' Fair for two days, me representing Henningham Family Press, and Eyres, the New Arcadian Press.
The New Arcadians have amassed almost half a century of peerless writing on the political significance of landscapes and gardens, including the English Baroque Wentworth Castle, which Eyres helped save for the nation at the turn of the millennium. Like a bog-body's reversal of skin and bone, hothouse plants watered by innovative guttering in the main building invaded it, becoming its main supports.
The superstructure had to be laid out for restoration "like a giant Airfix kit''. Eyres and I find a surprising convergence of interests in the Baroque of the 1980s. The BFI has just released a remastered version of Peter Greenaway's film The Draughtsman's Contract.
In 1982, devotees of British arthouse cinema queued to see Greenaway's depiction of a mother and daughter plotting a course to retain their moated English Baroque manor house around the strutting men that dominate them. The badinage and sexual violence is set to a pulsing Michael Nyman soundtrack that has succeeded in being adopted as classical radio repertoire, despite electric bass that would be at home in the Blitz Club.
Greenaway's 1991 film Prospero's Books, with choreography by Michael Clark and Hi-Vision video inserts made with the same Quante! Paintbox system that TV news channels used for graphics, shows that what the British avant-garde was doing was no mere revival. Both films are avant-garde paintings with soundtracks. Did Eyres go to see them? "Oh, I took all the New Arcadians to see The Draughtsman's Contract. It was more or less a works outing!"
In 1988, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze published The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Leibniz, a German contemporary of lsaac Newton, was among the generation of Baroque mathematicians who wanted to reassert the possibility of God's existence. Empiricists, with their Classical view of matter, had created a symmetrical world that was not so much a sturdy structure built on proofs, as a maquette built with questions any god would fail.
The issue, as with many builds, was lack of space. Leibniz's response took inspiration from Baroque art, and utilised the fold, which allows for complexity and difference to coexist. As Deleuze explains, organisms fold and unfold to a degree that belongs to their species. "Thus an organism is enveloped by organisms, one within the other like Russian dolls. The first fly contains the seeds of all flies to come ... And when an organism dies, it does not really vanish, but folds in upon itself."
We are beings in the world instead of beings for the world. Every indivisible thing "gives the possibility of the world beginning over and again" as with DNA where, with extraordinary prodigality, the blueprints for life are found in every cell of every organism, with a few individuating flourishes.
Picture space filling with an abundance of pleated matter over time. Our buildings and places are manipulations of this matter. Animals are tight concentrations of matter that become indivisible souls. From the first crease in your embryo to your brain's ongoing origami, you have been "called to become reasonable". And you will unfold, returning the organisms you have sheltered to the world.
Architectural historian Mario Carpo has described "the fold" as "a unifying figure whereby different segments and planes are joined and merge in continuous lines and volumes ... Folds avoid fractures, overlay gaps, interpolate."
Architect Greg Lynn's 1993 guesteditorship of Architectural Design - an issue called "Folding in Architecture" - cemented the fold's influence on architecture. At the time, differences were embodied as Postmodern collisions. But in Deleuze's approach to the fold, Lynn saw a different response to difference: "If there is a single effect produced in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a new continuous mixture.”
This was not to be a "Neo-Baroque" style of revived decorative motifs. Lynn's fold in architecture meant "a far richer logic of curvilinearity that can be characterised by the involvement of outside forces in the development of form". A building curves not because it has borrowed a form from art history but in response to a manifest pressure on the site "in response to programmatic, structural, economic, aesthetic, political and contextual influences".
Lynn is clear: "It is important to maintain a logic rather than a style of curvilinearity," he writes. But he seems to accept this shift may be restricted to an individual building's form, as with the baroque church plonked down on a High Renaissance, star-shaped city plan. Indeed, the range of forces Lynn suggests may be enfolded together are rarely combined heterogeneously in the developments of the 1990s.
Peter Eisenman explores how the fold could be used, in theory, to unlock repressed urban features at Rebstock. At best, Gehry's 1997 Bilbao Guggenheim draws in tourists to stave off degradation in the port district; at worst it is accused of cultural imperialism in the Basque region. But, with greater cooperation, could the different forces in a site be brought together to make Lynn's continuous mixture? Without erasing any stakeholders and without settling for collisions with winners and losers? Remember, weak forces are still forces. The fold nurtures organisms so that their complexity can survive. Therefore the site's purpose will survive and be elevated to reasonableness.
As Lynn said of his guesteditorship: "What is being asked in different ways by the group of architects and theorists in this publication is: how can architecture be configured as a complex system into which external particularities are already found to be plied?"
Urbanism becomes about enfolding and nurturing embryonic and dependent social structures that will in turn keep a place social and diverse - an urban arcade where beauty will emerge.
As Zizek has explained, Classicists are afraid that without an all-encompassing masterplan, antisocial chaos will erupt. Yet they may concede that antisocial behaviour intrudes on the most masterful of plans, like insolent Arcadian shepherds clutching two-litre bottles of cider. Signs prohibiting skateboarding are part of this battle between Classical order and Baroque love. Yet both systems hope that beauty will emerge. They may also agree that when a community invests in a place, this prevents antisocial behaviour.
The community of Dalston Curve Garden have already done what the Classicist considers the root of all evil; they have separated from the whole and attached themselves to an imperfection on their doorstep. If one day, the gates beyond the Curve stage were thrown open and a visitor was leaving Dalston Junction station, over the road, what kind of place would they pass through?
As Lynn understood the fold, if organisations bring together heterogeneous stakeholders in a way that treats them as the pressures upon a site, instead of obstacles to proportion, "they are better able to incorporate disparate elements within a continuous system". By extending the fold in architecture beyond the individual buildings in a place, we make planning into a process of identifying the folding that has already taken place.
Urbanism becomes about enfolding and nurturing embryonic and dependent social structures that will in turn keep a place social and diverse - an urban arcade where beauty will emerge. The political garden, rather than the street plan, is the repository of English Baroque planning. Perhaps the urban garden is the site we need to bring the curve to the city.
David Henningham lives and works in Dalston. He is an artist, author and bookbinder and co-founder of Henningham Family Press. His first novel, Foulness, will be published in summer 2024.
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