Gallery: "mr wolf"
While Mr Wolf was working on the hotel at Deer Island, he became fixated with modular carpet tiles. It wasn't the same as designing epic space for a living, granted, but whilst leafing through binders to select a suitable carpet, he discovered the work of Global Carpetco. It was a $5 billion turnover company from the US, but rather than being impressed by its vast scale and enormous profits, he became fascinated by the kitsch patterns that someone inside its HQ in South Carolina dreamed up.
What was going on inside the designer’s head? Was it all just a swirling pool of colours and funfair sounds? They were clearly a visionary – or perhaps delusionary, tripping on acid.
His clients at the Deer Island hotel had selected a mad pattern, but he deflected them by explaining that he wasn’t keen on its aesthetics. It reminded him of the scimitars in the Turkish Delight advert, and the trihelions of the biohazard symbol. Mr Wolf suggested that other people might draw the same parallels. He needed to check, for appearances’ sake and the client’s benefit, whether he could find a better pattern.
The main advantage of the tile was that Global Carpetco had a very nice Scottish sales rep, with a lovely smile and a powerful AMG Mercedes estate car which she drove like Colin McRae used to do. Except that a rally champion wouldn't have carried carpet tile samples in the back as ballast; when McRae gave it 110% over a yump and his Impreza became airborne, so would the carpet samples.
The tiles themselves came with a lifetime guarantee, which was once unheard of on this side of the Atlantic. They also offered custom patterns and Mr Wolf realised that he was fortunate, in an age of assembling buildings from catalogues, to get the chance to design something bespoke. It was “Arts and Crafts fabricated by machine”. He sketched out a subtler pattern and emailed it to South Carolina, then breathed out.
Back home, Mr Wolf picked up the paperback he was reading, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. “If a man's got talent and guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep.”
Sheep? Mr Wolf didn’t like the sound of that. Sheep are best when made into carpets.
* * *
Above the new dining room at the hotel, the roof formed a prism with six parallam beams which came together at a steel node. Having sorted the carpet, next on the list was the node which was to be fashioned in a machine shop on the mainland using a four metre high computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) milling machine.
Mr Wolf visited a metal-bashing factory in the old, grimy part of the city to watch, enrapt, as a Butler Elgamill worked on the structural node. The computer-guided machinery was carving it, millimetre by millimetre and very slowly, from a solid forging of stainless steel. Streamers of swarf emerged, just like the sparkling ribbons cast aside when Christmas wrapping is ripped open.
There are only two ways to make something like this. You can do it reductively: machining it from a forging or billet, and just like a sculptor carving marble you start with a lump of material and render it down. Or additively: where you start with a male pattern you’d like to replicate, form a female mould from it, then use that as a lost wax model where molten bronze or iron is teemed into the cavity.
Although there long existed tools whose only function was to make other tools, machine tools are unique: they’re machines which make other machines. Initially, those machines were built by hand, but at the start of the 1800’s, they grew accurate enough to replicate things by themselves.
While the structural tree was being fabricated, Mr Wolf listened to the managing director of the fabrication firm holding forth. Slowly and surely he began to remind Mr Wolf of his own father, who had also been in the machine tool business, and who also proselytised whenever he had a captive audience.
“The very first machine tool was invented in Scotland, by a firm called Craig & Donald in the town of Johnstone,” the MD explained to Mr Wolf, who nodded. “They eventually became part of the Scottish Machine Tool Corporation, which doesnae exist any more. Where their factory stood is Johnstone Town Hall nowadays. A wee bronze plaque records what went on there. That’s all that’s left.”
He shook his head and paused, trying to judge Mr Wolf’s reaction before continuing, “Fancy that, replacing practical men who make things with a bunch of super-annuated stuffed shirts. I always wanted to make things,” he went on after another pause, “I believe that folk in countries like Scotland should make things. I'm part of the culture that says you are what you do; that goes back to Socrates. Socrates!” he reiterated for effect.
“I’ve never subscribed to the view that fabrication is a Luddite craft activity. There's no future in that. It's no’ a question of sitting there polishing the stone for another ten years.” He pronounced Luddite, as he had Socrates, with real vehemence.
Mr Wolf was very pleased with the structural node, but less sure about machine tool zealotry.
* * *
Mr Wolf’s final lesson was on the worst blockwork in the world. The main contractor on the hotel contract was struggling, so he'd rounded up a few lads from across the North Channel, whose company was called The Cherry Orchard or something along those lines. They owed little to Chekhov other than the tragedy of how bad their blockwork was, and Mr Wolf wondered whether his clients would have to auction off the hotel in order to afford a replacement team of brickies who could actually lay blocks.
Having previously pulled them up on a lack of ties in the cavity (which they’d filled with mortar snots instead), and lengths of Ancon starter rail that weren’t tied into anything, he was horrified to find a massive pile of rubble on the floor slab, and blocks being chopped up using a bolster rather than a Stihl saw. By this point Mr Wolf had almost given up.
There was nothing to do other than condemn the wall, then try to get the sub-contractor removed from the contract. Just then, the late afternoon sun hit the wall, emphasising how the faces of the blocks didn’t run through, and highlighting how the courses wandered and how the perpends were randomly uneven. Mr Wolf swore under his breath and turned on his heel.
As he started pondering which SBCC clauses he could use to eject them from the project, the brickies ran out of mortar, so the little putt-putt mixer was fired up. Then they started up their old Thwaites dumptruck, which sounded like a 150kg warthog defecating in a bucket. The site was too noisy to think in, so Mr Wolf left, convinced that he’d avoid wet trades in future, at all costs, even if the effort killed him.
ps. These anecdotes are based on real events, with names and locations changed to protect the identity of the guilty.
Whilst in between adventures, Mr Wolf took a job with an architecture magazine. You might in fact say he was a cub reporter.
It was a start-up title, bankrolled by a media company which wanted to move into the glossy, controlled circulation titles which are aimed at “professionals” … little realising that there’s less money to be had in design of any sort than in the legal, advertising or medical professions.
Mr Wolf had already established a minor reputation for himself as a commentator. He was occasionally phoned up by Radio Scotland when they wanted an opinion on a tower block going up, or a well-known landmark burning down. As he put it on his years-out-of-date personal website, he was a “go to” voice for radio debates. Really? Can you even say that about yourself without blushing?
Ultimately he fancied an Arts slot on TV, sifting culture on the leather-upholstered settee with Kirsty Wark – but he had to make do with sixty seconds chatting to Janice Forsyth on Radio Scotland’s graveyard slot, or an occasional quote in the papers. After all, he wasn’t Scotland’s Most Famous Living Architect.
Nonetheless, a minor reputation got his loafer-clad foot in the metaphorical door, and he snagged a commission to write the manuscript for what became FOUL AIR, a fast-paced thriller which explores the invention of the air admittance valve. It was heady stuff, an intellectual battle of wits between the Andersson family’s Durgo company which created their first AAV in 1970, and Sture Ericson who designed the Bjare Valve in 1973. (True story, kids). The book was one of Scottish Architectural Publishing’s better sellers that year.
Popular opinion has it that journalists never fully commit to an opinion, so most articles offer both sides of the debate in order to let the readers decide (and to avoid alienating half of the readership). Regardless, Mr Wolf was happy to offer strong opinions and divisive comment, on demand, wherever he could find an outlet.
Despite that profligacy, it was difficult. Not long ago there were several magazines which published long-form journalism: intelligent pieces which took time to research and write and edit. But not today’s popular press. The tabloids offer a steady diet of affirmation, focussing on simple topics which require little research or background. They hype and they hector, but rarely force you to think.
Sometimes the architectural press isn’t much better. One former favourite weekly used to be 100 pages long and printed on decent stock; they employed subs to fact-check and make squiggly marks all over the proofs. Now it’s all soft proofed on PDF, and we know from bitter experience that screaming typo’s never show up on screen.
Nonetheless, the magazine format is still important. Edwin Heathcote, architectural critic of the Financial Times thought that, "Architects are like novelists. They regard the most important thing in their careers as being published. Buildings are all very well but the are somehow only truly complete when they have appeared in a glossy mag.” (Is It All About Image?: How PR Works in Architecture).
So Mr Wolf made contacts. That was easy. Early on, someone explained that architects are complete tarts for journalists or anyone involved with the media, because they think they have useful contacts that they can exploit on their own behalf. The other side thinks exactly the same, so you have everything required for a mutual exploitation society.
Once he got into his stride Mr Wolf was, by a long way, the most unscrupulous writer I ever came across. He wrote headlines first then retro-fitted the story. He made things up. He lifted snippets from back issues of other magazines, hoping that nobody would notice, since architects are only interested in seeing photos of their completed buildings and don’t bother reading the words which interrupt the images. Or so they say…
He even invented an inventor, who used to pop up now and then with some new, radical building material when there was a gap to fill in the News pages. It was Fake News before that term was popularised by Donald Trump, but had more sinister roots. As Joseph Goebbels once said: "If you tell a lie often enough, eventually people will start to believe it."
So Mr Wolf told stories, and when he lied, he made sure the lie was good and repeated often. For example, when he reviewed a monograph about a dour Edwardian architect with a walrus moustache, he puffed that it was “Uplifting, tender, brilliant, insightful and compelling.” It was the sort of dull book that he traded in at a secondhand bookshop on Great Western Road, five minutes after he’d finished skimming it.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. He came across that phrase first in a book about the architectural illustrator Gordon Cullen, and he added it to his notebook of cribs for future use. Years later he discovered that Cullen had stolen it from Thoreau and when Mr Wolf was caught out, he recited, “Talent borrows, genius steals” – ironically without giving any credit to Oscar Wilde.
That’s what Mr Wolf’s life is like. A morality tale for all the family.
Just in case you’re still trying to keep up, some previous instalments in Mr Wolf’s story are here:
Setting the Wolf amongst the pigeons