Styles and Genres 4

Welcome to Croydon

ARCHITECTURE
Off to take some photos of Croydon's 'New York built in Poland' skyline. (John Grindrod ‏@Grindrod)

Oh, so a 1791 building containing jukebox, baseball photos, a fibreglass rhino & Egyptian cat is "Dickensian"? (Douglas Murphy ‏@entschwindet)

ghost modernism: “Devoid of its own ideas, this ghost modernism plundered the 1920, 1930s and 1940s but drew the line at Brutalism, which it replaced, reclad or had demolished.” (LRB on Jonathan Meades on Blairite modernism, March 2013)


Arts and Crafts baroque
decorated shed

cheap sh*t pomo (now looking weirdly lovely)
nondescript City fringe Postmodern offices (Hugh Pearman)
high-mo/po-tech (Douglas Murphy)
manga-high-tech-pomo (Adam Furman)

council pomo: Noddy hat roofs, that odd mix of yellow, red and blue brick, and a rather silly, jolly classicism...  pagodas, baubles, new vertical circulation cores, and a district housing office. (Douglas Murphy @entschwindet – But the pomo additions included useful things like obvious, well-lit entrances, lockable front doors and entryphones, and boxed-in staircases that had been open to the weather. Noddy-hat roofs? Noddy wore a long stocking cap with a bell. But “houses the public might have designed” were always called “Noddy boxes”.)

call-centre/ leisure centre chic (Joe Preston/ ‏@upthewoodenhill on proposed cladding for Guy’s Hospita)
military sublime (Corinna Dean)

FASHION
the "gigolo who stabs somebody to death in a Genet novel" look is back (a chris from a rose ‏@randlechris)
normcore: the creators of normcore now say that dressing in Man at C and A isn’t what they meant – they claim they meant moving from tribe to tribe and dressing appropriately. What we all think of as normcore is really called Acting Basic.)


ANTIQUES ETC
airport tribal/departure lounge (Thomas Plant and Bargain Hunt contestant)
Ashcan School (late 19th century American painters)

birdcage bandstand
brewery-ana
Byzantine wheat (It’s a kind of chain.)

Camden Town tat (from the market)
crumpled-paper aesthetic (in wax or oil paint): It’s what Daily Telegraph readers go for when they’re not buying views of the South of France with too much ultramarine and violet. Includes work where the material is the thing – paintings on rusted vintage tin trays, heads sculpted out of calcite stalagmites, origami old music paper.

féerique (art about fairies)
interesting: According to Flickr, “interesting” pictures are HD photos of nature, Thomas Kinkade meets 80s watery Zen landscapes. Long exposure, colours made more vivid.

Mockintash: You got it – pseudo Mackintosh typeface plus endless roses and designs that look vaguely like stained glass. (80s, 90s.)

papillon glass (iridescent)
ronde bosse enamel (blobby)

shedwork (a bit crude and naive, unless you're Sean Greenhalgh)

singerie (art involving monkeys, especially satirical)
Soviet product design (bad printing that looks a bit like a potato cut, very fashionable a few years ago)
sub St Ives: schoolof Mary Fedden

vermiculated finish (Flog It!)
whiplash curve (on art nouveau ceramics and furniture)

More here, and links to the rest.