Huge Cocoons and Tiny Stars

Hello!

It’s a funny word, "cocoon", don't you think?

I ask that because I’m sitting in one now. 

Today is one of those brutal travelling days that your mother warned you about ... or at least, she would've done if she'd been a hippie backpacker in the 60s, who'd spent several years trekking through Asia and Africa and possibly some time on a kibbutz. If not, then she probably focused her warnings on other stuff like running with scissors. 

But anyway, it is (brutal, I mean).  

I only managed about two hours' sleep last night, and the journey started at 6:15 this morning when I left my flat in Almaty. There’s a hotel room in Athens with my name on it, but that room (and more importantly, the bed it hopefully contains) is still more than ten hours away – four and a half of flying, an hour on the Athens metro, and about five hours of sitting around in airports like this one in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

So far, my five-hour transit stop at Heydar Aliyev airport has been about as much fun as a transit stop can be – which is to say “not that much, really, but there have at least been a few entertaining moments to leaven the boredom”.

ZVJOZDOCHKA
(larger than actual size)

The first of those moments happened shortly after we landed, while I was unloading my pockets to walk through the security screening thingie. Inspecting my minutiae, one of the staff there noticed with some delight that I had a zvjozdochka in amongst my keys and loose change. 

The word zvjozdochka  translates as sth like ‘tiny little star’. Ex-Soviet peoples use it to refer to a miniature tin of kampfa (a.k.a. 'tiger balm'), which comes emblazoned with a bright yellow Communist star on the front. 

When she saw it, the security guard let out a little gasp, grabbed the tin and opened it. She held it up to her nose and inhaled, savouring the kampfa smell. And I got the distinct sense that this was a nostalgic moment – as if the zvjozdochka was something she remembered from her childhood but hadn’t seen for a long time, and taking in its aroma was sending her back in time.

That in itself fascinated me, because the zvjozdochka is one of those things that’s absolutely ubiquitous in the ex-Soviet countries I’m familiar with – especially in Ukraine, where babushkas sell them in the street. In my mind, it almost qualifies as a symbol of those countries. 

But Azerbaijan, since it frantically boarded the escape pod and jettisoned itself out of the imploding USSR in 1991, has turned more towards the Turkic world. It was a natural move – both Turkey and Azerbaijan are Eurasian Muslim nations, and their languages are closely related (the Azeris speak a language often called ‘Azeri Turkish’, and just reading signs in the airport was enough to see the striking similarities). I suspect there may also be a kind of ‘enemy of my enemy’ type bond between them, given that both countries have what you might euphemistically call a 'rocky relationship' with neighbouring Armenia.

It's also done better economically than most of its former ‘sister republics’. To an extent, I imagine this has made it possible for the Azeris to throw off the old trappings of Soviethood – and perhaps the poor zvjozdochka has been a casualty of that process.

Anyway ... I offered the little star as a gift to the security guard, but she declined with a smile, even after my second attempt. 

I guess her unwillingness to accept gifts from passengers in the security screening area could be seen as a good sign for Azerbaijan, too :-)

I then arrived in the transit lounge, where my first concern was to find the smoking area. After that, I took a wander to acquaint myself with the space where I was going to be spending the next four hours. It was then that I spotted the words  “cocoon area” on a sign, right under “toilets” and “worship room”, with an arrow pointing diagonally left.

Obviously, this was a sign that I had to follow.

A minute later, I was surrounded by these rather unusual things:

COCOON CAFE - Heydar Aliyev Airport, Baku, 20.06.16

Basically, what you've got here is a bunch of two-storey oversized cubby houses, a couple of them with cafes or shops inside and most with seating upstairs and downstairs. They're in a rather large hall with an ornate patterned skylight, a few scattered trees and some songbirds. 

Now, I'm not going to say this is the greatest architectural masterpiece of our age, but I do think it's quite nifty. When you've got an airport building, you can either make it a series of bland rectangular halls, or you can, y'know, do something interesting.

Obviously the second one is preferable. And the coccoons are kinda cool – they're playful, 'organic' in style, and interestingly, a little Islamic-looking at the same time.

And this brings me onto a theme which I think I'll be exploring a little bit this summer: modern style.

See, I've had several conversations this year with people who wanted to attack modern art, architecture etc. etc. And I say to those people: sorry, but you get no sympathetic nods of agreement from me at all. 

Let me repeat that: NONE AT ALL.  

The word is packed with people who carry around an irrational dislike of modern style in their heads. Here's why I think this is the case:

1.         The styles of the past look impressive to us partly because they're
            different, and partly because all the bad examples of pre-modern style
            have been destroyed and/or forgotten. It's the same as when people
            talk nostalgically about music of, say, the 60s, while showing a disdain
            for contemporary music: they haven't quite got the point that we're
            hearing the whole gamut of contemporary music, from the best to the
            worst, whereas we only ever hear the best of the 60s stuff.

2.         Right from earliest childhood, we're conditioned to an idea of beauty
            that leans towards the classical. If you're paying attention, you can see
            this bias in nearly every school curriculum and in every travel brochure.
            And it makes no sense at all, for one simple reason: we don't live
            in classical times. We live now.  

            Travel guides are particularly good at re-inforcing this bias. Open any
            edition of the Lonely Planet, and read their descriptions of buildings.
            They reflexively praise almost anything baroque or neoclassical,
            however samey and derivative it is, and provided (in the neoclassical
            case) it wasn't commissioned under Stalin. At the same time, they just
            as reflexively trash almost anything built after 1920 – especially
            if it happens to be Soviet. It's like they're trying to win Round Two of the
            Cold War, one bad review at a time. 

3.         Although I am a fan of classical architecture (don't get me wrong here),
            the same can't be said of classical painting. Monet leaves me cold;
            van Gogh I couldn't care less about; Cezanne bores me so much I
            want to cry. 

            Please, don't think for a moment that I'm saying these guys were
            bad. They were very obviously the opposite of bad. I'm saying that,
            as a person born in the late 20th Century, living in the early 21st and
            not particularly well-schooled in the history of art, their work simply
            doesn't speak to me. I'll take a huge walk-through installation made
            entirely of lemons, filling an enormous hall, with the sounds of
            chickens clucking in the background, in preference to any of those
            artists. That's not a condemnation of their work - it's just my
            preference. The installation means more to me; I can make more sense
            of it. Plus it's just way more fun and interesting. 
Modern architecture should speak to us too, and I think it often tries to – but, for some reason, many people don't hear it. Or if they do hear anything, they largely don't enjoy it. 

In many cases, the problem lies with the design itself – be it of an individual building or an entire public space. For instance, you can find endless examples of poorly designed urban environments which do more to alienate people than to encourage identification and appreciation. That much is indisputable. 

(Btw, there's a great TED rant on this topic, in which the architect James Howard Kunstler angrily dissects the architecture of "Places not worth caring about" in America. It's really enjoyable, and it will introduce you to the wonderful phrase "technosis externality clusterfuck", among others. 

You can watch it here: Kunstler's Master Rant.)

However, there's also another problem: the clients. 

Think of your typical client for a major development project. Four hundred years ago, it was usually a regent of some kind. A hundred years ago, it was generally a government. Now, it's most likely a corporation. They don't care if the project glorifies them or reflects some ethic they have about how society should develop. They want it to come in under budget, and with all health and safety regulations adhered to. 

Ask a client like this if you can make the building a bit more interesting, and they'll go "We don't have the budget – but can you add another five stories of penthouse apartments?" or "Can we have more retail space?". That's where bland, ugly buildings come from. 

The practical upshot is this: effectively, the very same suits who, if you asked them, would probably complain about the ugliness of modern architecture, are themselves largely responsible for it. 

This is one of the reasons why I have so little time for people who don't like modern design. If they stopped to think about it for a minute, they'd probably realise that there are infinitely more architecture graduates nowadays than there ever were back in the times when kings and queens commissioned most construction projects. That means there's a frikkin' legion of architects just waiting for the chance to try out great, innovative and beautiful designs – but we live in a world of project managers and bean counters, and they stop it from happening most of the time. 

If you're one of those people, and I ever hear you complaining about modern architecture, expect to receive some physical pain. If you're not one of those people, but you hate modern design, just consider what it could be like if today's enormous pool of talent were used properly.

Of course, the analysis above is oversimplified, and it leaves out important stuff like the Bauhaus movement of the 1930s, and the cultural preference in some places for functional simplicity (see my entries on Finland). But at least in the former case (Bauhaus), we're largely over that now. There are also a few anomalies like the U.A.E., where the powers-that-be seem intent on using architecture to demonstrate to the world that new money is always tasteless. 

Still, those caveats aside, I think that what I'm saying holds water. If modern architecture doesn't inspire you, I think in most cases you can blame the suits, not the architects.

Meanwhile, Baku's airport offers a nice (though modest) example what happens when you step back and give the designer some latitude. You don't always get functional concrete monstrosities. Sometimes you get big fun coccoons.

That's all I have to say about this for now. Sorry to get ranty on you.  

The other cool thing about today is that it's the first of 58. I'll be visiting half a dozen countries, working in two of them, staying with friends in another, and no doubt collecting some tales to tell along the way. So I'll no doubt be ranting wildly over the next 7-8 weeks.

Hope you'll join me for some, if not all, of the journey :-)

Bye!