Urban photography and the high rise apartment

Artist Jo Howell takes us through her feelings about these city colossus by revisiting this article from 2018.

3 Polaroid images together showing a street scene

Repeating themes and iconography

Being an artist that works predominantly in photographic mediums means that I can sometimes find myself being repetitive, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

I revisit certain muses from time to time, and these apartments are a daily fixture in the majority of viewpoints that make up my day to day.

I use them to navigate the city. I can point them out from the aeroplane when coming home. On a clear day these sentinels can be seen from nearly every high point in the city.

A blue print of a palm tree filled with a high rise apartment

I didn’t used to think that I liked this type of architecture, but it has a strange beauty. And, a life of it’s own. When dusk comes in, one by one the different lights come on. A warm tungsten glow shining out into the cold of the northern nights. Comforting stalwart watch guard’s protecting the mouth of the river.

Obviously, I’m aware that they’re not living beings in their own right, but the rhythm of the lives going on inside them lends the building’s personality.

I look at these building’s and consider how I would change them into vertical farms, or use solar paint on the outside to harvest energy for the communities living inside them. Vertical space in our Cities is drastically under used.

There’s a power and food crisis in the UK, that will worsen with the onset of Brexit. I’ve often thought Maggie missed a trick when she closed the mines and left a gaping hole in our economy. If we had started investing in green enterprise’s and technologies back in the 80s we’d be top of the game by now.

In the near future we’re all going to have to do our fair share to reduce poverty and pollution. Clever adaptations of what we already have could lead to self sufficiency and independence from the strangle hold of energy giants.

Just a ponder…

Jo Howell reflects on the article and other works made since 2018 that reuse the iconic apartment buildings

After writing that original article 6 years ago I continued to work on various interpretations of the high rise. The Spartan nature of the brutal block punctuating the skyline is most definitely one of my favourite icons of working class life. Proud somehow. Lonely. Yet constant.

In 2019, a year after writing the initial article there was the tragedy of the Grenfell fire. It scared thousands of people that live in these blocks. Most social housing in apartment buildings were clad in the same substandard crap that caused the Grenfell tower to become a fiery death trap.

Digital mash up of Apartment palm on canvas by Jo Howell 2019

Grenfell Tower is described on Wikipedia as a derelict 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington in London, England. The tower was completed in 1974 as part of the first phase of the Lancaster West Estate. Most of the tower was destroyed in a severe fire on 14 June 2017.

This is a savagely drastic oversimplification of a terrible loss of life. There were 72 people killed and many more injured and displaced. It was a human tragedy and huge loss of life that should have been avoided.

Apartment on sea glass by Jo Howell 2019

A report on the public enquiry into the disaster has said:

Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s report chronicles failures in the construction industry, the council, regulators and central government. “The simple truth is the deaths that occurred were all avoidable.

Guardian Newspaper 2024

The upshot of the report was that the insulation used in the cladding was highly flammable when it should have been fire resistant. The cladding caught and turned the 24 storey building into a terrifying inferno.

Apartment on sea glass with actual apartment by artist Jo Howell 2019

This cladding problem is widespread across the country. The providers of the cladding were involved in many layers of deception and fraud. Apparently they helped regulators to get the ‘wording’ right on their safety certificates.

The problem we now face is that due to our terrible regulatory systems (and lack of oversight) there are 100s of these apartment buildings clad in this substandard and outright dangerous material. The poorest and most vulnerable of us are living in tinder boxes.

Worse still is the fact that prosecutions will not be started until at least 2027. Once again fraud and white collar crime even though it is responsible for so many deaths is hard to make charges stick. There are many levels of failure here. From councils to governments. It’s a spectacular f**k up.

This box is not a box by Jo Howell 2020

The visual motif is just the same but now I read it with so much more complexity. In 2018 I thought lovingly of these buildings as protectors of everyone living their lives in them.

Now they aren’t the protectors. Since 2018 they have become ticking time bombs. People are living surrounded on all four side for multiple storeys by fire propellant. Think Wicker man but far more pervasive and likely.

That’s so screwed up.

I know that Sunderland council put in aluminium separators on some of the floors. This is intended to confine the fire to X amount of floors and theoretically it should not be able to pass that barrier. I’m not a civil engineer but I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that if the cladding is still the same that these aluminium separators are probably not much relief.

The job is humongous. It will cost insane amounts of money. Social housing in apartment buildings up and down the UK almost all exclusively used this product or another similarly fraudulently rated material.

Time relentlessly marches forward. Constantly adding to our experience, environment and knowledge.

Though this is not an easy fix maybe it’s time to think about those unused vertical surfaces. Take away the flammable cladding and replace it with plant technology. Non flammable and beautiful. Proactive and environmentally positive.

Do you have an urban icon that you return to time and again?

Let me know what you think!