Will Wiles enjoys his leisurely view of a tower’s construction and rues the day when the drama will finish
They’ve been building a tower block in my garden. Not quite in my garden, you understand, but about 200m away from it, and the top half-dozen floors look down into my garden. It’s the first – and closest – of a coming group of towers on a former gasworks in my corner of east London, a massive development of 1,500 homes. Its main virtue architecturally is sobriety, and once it’s complete I’m sure we will stop noticing it. But I’ll be sad to see it finished, because I have derived surprising pleasure from watching it being built.
Construction sites are always interesting places, and I don’t think anyone can work in architecture – even in the dilettante annex that is architecture journalism – without having some enthusiasm for the nuts and bolts of how buildings get put together. I’ve been able to watch some construction close up, from beginning to end, not least in the rebuilding of my own house. But that was on a small scale, and I was too heavily involved, financially and emotionally, to enjoy it as a spectator. The tower at the gasworks is a giant, complicated thing, with a new detail every day, and I can watch it at my leisure. Purely by chance, a couple of months ago my father gave me an old pair of binoculars. It’s hard to ignore a sign from the universe like that.
The constant changes at the tower – the stately rhythm of formwork and concrete yielding to the more delicate changes of scaffolding, cladding panels and windows – are more diverting than the finished building ever will be (and once people live in it, I probably shouldn’t ogle them.) The philosopher Edmund Burke wrote about the beauty of the incomplete in his 1756 essay On the Sublime and Beautiful: ‘The spring is the pleasantest of seasons; and the young of most animals, though far from being completely fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full-grown, because the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense.’
This, for Burke, is connected to the sublime quality of infinity: the unfinished extends into the unlimited realms of possibility, whereas the complete has firm boundaries. A degree of mystery adheres even to this very quotidian London apartment block.
Another reason to mourn the building’s completion will be the obsolescence of its companions: two tower cranes, which have been entertaining us since long before the concrete frame rose above the neighbours’ chimney-pots. We call them Frasier and Niles, and having them conducting their sedate permutations in our garden feels like a privilege. The tower crane is so frank and obvious in its structure – no gymnastic play of forces, just a mast, a cantilever and a counterweight – as to make it recognisably sublime. Burke, talking about natural features, mentions that the perpendicular is more powerful than the inclined plane.
But a tower crane is not crude. From a distance it is delicate, almost filigree. It’s as if they never stopped being a diagram. There’s a heroic romance to it: that lonely operator, like a lighthouse-keeper. And, like a lighthouse, the aircraft warning lights keep up a vigil through the night. Their red glow fills the garden when the jib is pointed our way. Tower cranes would be impressive enough if they kept stationary, and the fact they move – smoothly, gracefully, quietly – is faintly miraculous. It’s like having a huge kinetic sculpture in the neighbourhood, a giant Alexander Calder mobile. Niles was obscured when the concrete frame topped out. I will be bereft when Frasier has left the building.
CRANING FOR A VIEW
This reminds me of OMA’s Prada Transformer from 2009: a temporary pavilion in Seoul with four flat faces, each one a different shape, which was reconfigured for different events by being entirely picked up and set down again. A bit laborious perhaps, but I found it an inspiring piece of kinetic architecture, like an Archigram thought experiment made real. The lifting and turning was done by four extending cranes – a shame, I thought, that these withdrew between operations, and were not an honoured part of the splendid thing.