no2self.net

the journal of an architect

Notes from ‘Structural Fabulation: An essay on fiction of the future’

By Rob on August 27, 2014

It would be great to find more examples of keynote speeches given in my profession that even came close to the care, rigour, sense of shared responsibility and warmth for fellow thinkers and practitioners as that found in Bethany Nowviskie’s talk on Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene. I suspect I’ll be digging around at the references and ideas for weeks.

Somewhere in there is mention of Donna Haraway and it reminded me of a reference to a talk I think I got from Adam Greenfield on twitter. I’ve watched most of it but the volume of ideas is too great to not be overwhelmed in one sitting. However, somewhere in there is mention of ‘speculative fabulation’, which sounded gorgeous, so I hunted for a source and bought the book.

Scholes

Note taking and head scratching for this year’s upcoming MArch studio at BCU is underway, so in the age old tradition of ‘blogging all dog-eared pages’ here are the choice samples from Robert Scholes’ ‘Structural Fabulation: An essay on fiction of the future’.

I’m hoping this will help a discussion that expands on last year’s exploration of infrastructure/design fiction. I’m particularly tweaked by the comparison between speculative and dogmatic fabulations as a metaphor for comparisons between the role of the architect versus other built environment fabulators. There are also moments that afford a rather neat loop back into thinking about the Anthropocene too.

Didactic romance anyone?

NOTES:

(my emphasis in bold)

On writing fiction:

Fiction has always been characterized by its ability to perform two functions… We may call these two functions sublimation and cognition. As sublimation, fiction is a way of turning our concerns into a satisfying shape, a way of relieving anxiety, of making life bearable. In its cognitive function, fiction helps us to know ourselves and our existential situation.

All writing, all composition, is construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. There is no mimesis, only poiesis. No recording. Only constructing.

All fiction contributes to cognition, then, by providing us with models that reveal the nature of reality by their very failure to coincide with it.

Quoting Olaf Stapledon’s ‘Last and First Men’ (1930):

“To romance of the future may seem be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvelous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities… But if such imaginative construction of possible futures should be at all potent, our imagination must be strictly disciplined. We must endeavour not to go beyond the bounds of possibility set by the particular state of culture within which we live.”

On Doris Lessing:

She has moved with the times and sees that the future is the only lever with which we can hope to nudge the present in a better direction.

On Speculative Fabulation:

Fabulation, then, is fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way.

There are two varieties of fabulation or didactic romance which corresponds roughly to the distinction between romances of religion and romances of science. We may call these two forms “dogmatic” and “speculative” fabulation, respectively… most didactic romances are clearly dominated by one tendency or the other.

A dogmatic fabulation:
…works out of a closed, anti-speculative system of belief. (e.g Dante’s Commedia)

A speculative fabulation:
…is a creature of humanism, associated from its origins with attitudes and values that have shaped the growth of science itself. (e.g. More’s Utopia)

On Structural Fabulation:

In works of structural fabulation the tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favourite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments.

Man must create his future himself. History will not do it for him. And the steps he has already taken to modify the biosphere can be seen as limiting the future options of the human race. It is in this atmosphere that structural fabulation draws its breath, responding to these conditions of being, in the form of explorative narrative. The extrapolation may be bold and philosophical or cautious and sociological, but they must depart from from what we know and consider what we have due cause to hope and fear. Like all speculative fabulations they will take their origin in some project dislocation of our known existence, but their projections will be based on a contemporary apprehension of the biosphere as an ecosystem and the universe as a cosmosystem.

In the perfect structural fabulation, idea and story are so wedded as to afford us simultaneously the greatest pleasures that fiction provides: sublimation and cognition.

Seen in cultural terms, then, structural fabulation is a kind of narrative which is genuinely fictional but strongly influenced by modern science. It is specifically romantic in that it breaks, consciously and deliberately, with what we know and accept to be the case. But it develops its arbitrary parameters with a rigor of scientific method. Seen in purely formal terms, structural fabulation is a development of a tradition of speculative that has a long history in Western culture. This tradition is rooted in the genre of didactic romance, and can be seen as a dialectical antithesis of dogmatic fabulation.

didactic-romance

Posted in books, environment, ideas, scifi, theory | Tagged anthropocene, books, teaching, writing | 2 Responses

Plastic Praxis: MArch teaching at BCU

By Rob on October 8, 2013

I’m collaborating with Mike Dring, the MArch Course Director at Birmingham School of Architecture this academic year to help run a studio for years 5 & 6. Over the last few weeks we’ve been crafting a studio agenda which is less about the question of how we should build and more about questioning why. We’re examining architectural practice itself and hoping to encourage our students to see this final stage of their education as an opportunity to fully understand their many possible roles and – just as importantly – foster some bold optimism in what is increasingly described as bleak times for the future of the profession.

We’ve begun in the traditional way by proposing some key pieces of writing to set the studio ethos. We hope we’ve been non-traditional however in our choices of text. They are: Future Practice by Rory Hyde and Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill.

Alongside these examinations of broader, strategic actions we have also begun to acknowledge an interest in how one should act at a more intimate, immediate scale through references to books such as Jeremy Till’s Architecture Depends; and in what field we might ultimately take action by setting suburban housing areas as our proposed sites (Shard End in Birmingham and Almere in the Netherlands) and considering the new resurgence of interest in the custom or self-build home.

We’ll be taking the topic of future practice both literally and metaphorically by finding excuses to experiment with digital tools ranging from Arduinos and Minecraft through to Grasshopper and BIM, acknowledging that the profession is increasingly part of the digital economy and future graduates must be able to use it to their (and their client’s) advantage.

With that in mind Mike and I have of course launched a web site and a twitter account. We’ll be sharing links to wider reading and and ideas that we see elsewhere, as well as student work in the future as the studio develops. If you’re interested in any of the topics described here, feel free to follow or comment.

Finally, here’s the studio agenda we’ve kicked off with and the full book list as it currently stands:

PLASTIC_studio briefing

95% of buildings are not designed by architects
83% of architecture is not about design

  1. investigating the challenges and opportunities of future practice and strategic design
  2. exploring ‘infrastructure fictions’ and ‘dark matter’
  3. speculating on the latency of new towns and urban extensions

“Architecture’s core aim may still be the application of spatial intelligence, but if that outcome is not seen as valuable by the wider culture, then it doesn’t solve two problems, one small, one big. The first problem is architecture’s marginalisation. This is not necessarily important in itself. Or at least, if the debates as to its value cannot be meaningfully resolved, it will only be of importance to architects. But the second problem concerns how to access and deploy the considerable potential of architecture to solve genuinely meaningful and significant problems beyond the building. This one is important.”

Dan Hill in the foreword to ‘Future Practice’, Rory Hyde, Routledge 2012

The studio will examine both the method/process/product of architecture as described by Hyde et al, and theories and concepts around the future of established ‘planned communities’ within the contested (sub)urban field. The idea of operating at the ‘edge’ of existing professional and physical boundaries demands enquiry into diverse fields from politics to product design and beyond, and the chapter titles of Hyde’s ‘Future Practice’ suggest some ambitious and engaging new roles; whole-earth architect, historian of the present, urban activist, contractual innovator, strategic designer.

Our study sites this year are Shard End, a suburb in East Birmingham, built to satisfy the critical housing shortage in the immediate post war period, and Almere new town built on reclaimed polders east of Amsterdam in the 1980s to alleviate pressure on existing urban centres with extreme densities. Both represent ‘communities without propinquity’, a term coined by Melvin Webber in 1963 to describe the new town communities (in this case of Milton Keynes). Propinquity describes continuity and evolution; whilst these places were once ‘new’ (and we include Shard End in this as a large scale urban extension), they have reached a critical point in their existence having established themselves within the wider urban construct and grown histories of their own. They face serious challenges but also offer huge potential. Often described (by those external to these communities) as monocultural, monofunctional, and monoformal (sub)urban space, these spaces have a latent character, a hidden opportunity to adapt and evolve.

The overarching challenge for studio is to explore these opportunities through excursions on density, diversification, and growth (the ‘matter’), and the ‘meta’ that surrounds it from the role of regulation, legislation, political agency, public/private sector supply histories and future models for ‘civic enterprise’ and ‘intentional communities’.

Book list:

  • Architecture Depends – Jeremy Till
  • Future Practice – Rory Hyde
  • Dark Matter and Trojan Horses – Dan Hill
  • Recipes for Systemic Change – Helsinki Design Lab
  • Around and About Stock Orchard Street – ed. Sarah Wigglesworth
  • Out of the Woods – Borer and Harris
  • The Architecture Machine – Nicholas Negroponte (copy available online)
  • Cohousing in Britain – Diggers and Dreamers
  • Cohousing – McCamant & Durrett
  • Rural Studio – Samuel Mockbee
  • Landscape Futures – Geoff Manaugh
  • Form + Code in Design, Art and Architecture
  • Urban Maps – Richard Brook and Nick Dunn
  • SUB_PLAN – Finn Williams/ Architectural Association
  • Explorations in Architecture, Teaching Design Research – ed. Reto Geiser
  • White Night_Before a Manifesto – Metahaven
  • After the City – Lars Lerup
  • FARMAX & Metacity Datatown – MVRDV
  • Non-Plan – ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler
  • Slow Space – ed. Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong
  • The Cultivated Wilderness – Paul Shepheard

Personal note:

I’m genuinely delighted to be back at the school that raised me for almost a decade. I’ve done various bits of visiting tutor work before over the years since I graduated but this is the first time I’ve had a hand in shaping a studio program. The decade of education of which I speak is perhaps one of the reasons that we’re considering the topics described. My generation needs to acknowledge that the luxury of time and funding available to us is now sadly long since vanished. To propose teaching it today as if those days remained would be a mistake. Whilst the future of architectural education is perhaps uncertain, to begin by looking inwards and questioning practice itself seems like an appropriate way to start.

The ideas and writings suggested here are unashamedly just a list of people and projects that have inspired me over the last few years. My personal interest in digital tools is also clear to see but I believe appropriate on many levels. Access to such ideas is so often made possible thanks to the smartest people sharing the smartest stuff in smart places – making them accessible, shareable and hackable to the wide-eyed student in all of us. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know some of the main protagonists in this story (hello Dan Hill) thanks initially to shared interests on blogs and twitter – long may it continue and long may the newest students continue to do likewise. Also, in the midst of the debate about what an education should be about we should remember what an education should cost. My interest in digital tools such as Arduinos, Minecraft and fairly priced e-books for example is also about money.

Thanks to BCU for inviting me to take part and thanks also to anyone appearing in the references above. If you fancy making a star appearance for a lecture one afternoon let me know.

Posted in architecture, books, housing, practice, theory | Tagged teaching | 1 Response

the making of a home4self

By Rob on August 28, 2013

Outside the window a machine scrapes the ground flat in preparation for the arrival of a crane. An engineer is marking the ground with laser-guided accuracy and tomorrow the timber frame structure will be lifted into place then bolted to the cross-hairs of yellow paint marked on the 12 cubes of concrete we’ve poured into the ground. 5 years on from the first decision to buy a plot of land and embark on a self-build project the house is now finally under way.

I’ve been charting the journey elsewhere on a tumblr page, sharing a mixture of links, quotes and sketches to convey some of the stages that the project has moved through, but it’s time I tried to summarise the decisions we’ve taken along the way and start to share more details.

The house is an experiment. An excuse to test out numerous materials and detailing ideas that I’ve been thinking about for some time. An experiment that I hope will result in an opportunity to take what I’ve learnt and repeat the most successful elements of it again for others, helping them to make better houses for less money. It’s also going to be my family’s home and if there’s a tension to this story, a latent risk growing in this narrative, it’s about whether some of those experiments will fail to deliver the home we decided to strive for 5 years ago. This seems wholly appropriate though as if there was ever a time to embrace some risk and uncertainty in one’s career as an architect, surely the self-build project is the time to do so. I’m going to share the project here and elsewhere using various tools, but first I’ll share some of the back story. Partly because it’ll be cathartic for me and partly because the full story infuses every part of the final building I’ll be constructing over the coming weeks.

Folding stars:

The full story actually includes two houses. Before this house there was another house. An entirely different design that was forged during a time when both my family and the national economy were feeling a little braver and more care free. It was more ambitious in size, construction demands and most importantly funding expectations. We were committed to a self-build mortgage route and expecting to employ a main contractor to oversee it all. Whilst we worked out the funding route I spent months wallowing in the pleasure of being able to spend such a long period on early concepts, turning out alternatives week after week, folding and unfolding the volumes bound by the ground levels, neighbour’s house and laws of physics over and over again until I was sure I’d tried every permutation. There were pages full of diagrams in the sketchbook and seminal texts on the coffee table and it was a delight.

velocity of corners

It was also tortuous. Endless variations on a theme with no external force able to come between the client and architect, the gap between them having closed entirely and the brief becoming as fluid as the pen strokes in every sketch.

idea-hybrid

Then comes the blessed relief of a constraint you can cling on to. Mortgage paperwork, APR calculations related to energy performance and a cost estimate. You buckle down and find a solution in 3 sides of A4 paper.

courtyard-plans

I worked hard to get a planning approval. I suspect the local authority had never seen a design and access statement like it. We progressed towards construction information. I argued with the mortgage lender about what it costs to make a Passivhaus building and they sent a valuer round to ask questions such as whether there would be lead flashing on the chimney. The form he was filling out looked 30 years old. Meanwhile, the engineer and I spent months trying to work out how to stop an externally insulated basement slipping down a hill. I included a shed on the sedum roof just because frankly, every sedum roof should have one.

courtyard-model

I pushed on with lots of BIM and lay awake at night worrying about whether the chiaroscuro was sufficiently nuanced and if the sun on an autumn afternoon would crawl across the south facing concrete exactly as I hoped. Hashtag: cliché.  All I had to do next was build it.

courtyard-sun

Then one winter evening we called a halt to it all. Life had changed and none of it made sense any longer. Sarah had been diagnosed with an illness that prevented her from continuing her career as a GP, our finances changed overnight and driving home from work listening to Radio 4 brought the sound of Cameron and Osborne driving our economy headlong over a cliff in the name of austerity. We woke up and told the kids the dream was over. The news brought unexpected responses from both of them. My 8 year old daughter confessed she preferred small cottages anyway, just as long as it included a decent chimney. My 10 year old son, pulling himself together and wiping the tears from his eyes, immediately grabbed a piece of paper and a pen and drew a picture. It showed the house broken down into smaller pieces, each believably within our reach a section at a time, yet ultimately combining to become something that might still result in the home we wanted. I’ve never been prouder. Finally I had a proper brief.

start-over

Irk The Purists:

Liberated from the shackles of complete freedom, it was easy to embrace the new constraints. Slice the budget in half, respond to an illness that caused vertigo and made stairs a bad idea, work out how to procure it yourself – this was the new brief.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, I channelled Charles Moore’s three orders and I called on Walter Segal and his legacy of timber frame construction principles and combined it with the products of a local manufacturer of pre-fab cassette systems that I’d got to know over the last few years.

start-over-again

Frames between optimum span centres, posts on cheap foundations, an order of machines to organise the services, single storey living in an off-site manufactured villa. The revised planning application became a timber ark that we’d use to ride out the emotional flood. I lost my nerve at the last moment. In the face of growing doubt and learning how to deal with our new family life, I lost faith in the diagram and simplified it into a single structure with a single construction strategy. It was a mistake and the planning department, to their credit, knew it.

the-lodge

I quote: “We were disappointed by the new design, it looked like the work of a different architect and we wondered what had happened. We really liked the last proposal.”

It was good to know they liked the previous design at least. Not enough street presence was the feedback, a single storey structure with such simple elevation treatment just couldn’t cut it amongst the rest of the street. Could I make some of it two storeys? I had to acknowledge they were right. It looked like the author had been feeling downtrodden and sorry for himself and turned out a building to match. Which of course, he had.

An opportunity presented itself. This request for the addition of a two storey structure meant I could test the timber frame against something else. Throughout this period I’d been exploring ways to improve the performance of the affordable housing we make at Axis Design, specifically I’d been researching Passivhaus methods and developing detailing using thin joint masonry and natural materials. Two buildings, two materials and the option for two building phases should the finances demand it. The final redesign then became a split between two uses – sleeping and living.

start-over-replan

Two buildings connected by a service zone. An air-lock of carefully controlled mechanical and electrical inlets and outlets. The order of machines ultimately found its home nestled between the order of rooms and the order of dreams. I could connect up and commission the building on an independent trajectory to the other parts of the house, neatly allowing me to control the trades and procurement for this aspect as well as understand fully where the challenges lay in achieving the holy grail of energy efficient design: air-tight construction.

I resubmitted the planning application.

air-lock-detail

walter-model

All I had to do now was build it.

A further year of discussions and sketches about timber construction, thermal bridges, vapour barriers, clay blocks and triple glazed windows I got shipped from Maverick Windows in Dallas has ended in a building that would at times make Walter Segal proud and at others have him rolling in his grave. Such multi-layered, competing constraints running through almost every aspect of the house makes this project much more than the formal gestures and diagrams that made up the early pages of my sketchbook. It’s a hard won series of compromises chiselled out of the coal face of contemporary housing in the 21st century and I’ve learnt to love it for exactly that.

daylight

Alongside the seminal texts I’ve often cited on tumblr and twitter over the years I would add another to compliment the deviations I’ve made that will irk the purists so. Jeremy Till’s wonderful book ‘Architecture Depends’ has become a reassuring companion these last few months. In it he encourages the embracing of contingent dependencies as a mindful architectural praxis over the search for an independent (mindless) architectural form:

“My hunch is that architecture is the contingent discipline par excellence, and if we can deal with rather than deny that contingency, architecture may be seen as an exemplary form of transformative practice and lessons as to how to cope with contingency may be learned from its practice. But architects will deserve this attention only if they give up their delusions of autonomy and engage with others in their messy complex lives.”

Over the coming months I’ll be sharing what I can about the messy complex project that we’ve embarked on. There’ll be text and pictures at all the usual outlets and hopefully a few more unusual ones too, such as Little Printer, where you can get an alternative version of the story in a format more suited to the papernet and thermal printing. I did mention this was en experiment didn’t I?

Posted in architecture, design, home4self, housing | Tagged self-build | 3 Responses

Pacific BIM: a mutually interruptible neural bridge

By Rob on July 4, 2013

I’m hoping to do some teaching next year at Birmingham School of Architecture. Of the many topics that I’d like to include in any brief set for the students, I think it will be important to include a discussion about Building Information Modeling. I like a pencil as much as the next guy, but BIM is the future career path that students are now facing. Fact.

However, rather than it simply become a review of BIM as described by standards such as PAS 1192, a debate about what LOD you might strive for, whether we have achieved the ethereal heights of Level 3 or any other similar acronym soaked document, I’d prefer it if we looked at it through the eyes of Nicholas Negroponte and Guillermo del Toro.

Excerpts from The Architecture Machine, Nicholas Negroponte (1970) – PDF copy here:

“In this book there is no distinction between hardware and software, between special purpose computers and general purpose computers. The lines between what has been done, what can be done, and what might be done are all fuzzy. Our interest is simply to preface and to encourage a machine intelligence that stimulates a design for the good life and allow for a full set of improving methods. We are talking about a symbiosis that is a cohabitation between two intelligent species.”

“Imagine a machine that can follow your design methodology and at the same time discern and assimilate your conversational idiosyncrasies. This same machine, after observing your behaviour, could build a predictive model of your conversational performance. Such a machine could then reinforce the dialogue by using the predictive model to respond to you in a manner that is in rhythm with your personal behaviour and conversational idiosyncracies.”

“Computer-aided-ness demands a dialogue; events cannot be merely a fast-time manifestation of causes and effects… Computer-aided design requires at least three additional features: (1) mutual interruptability for man and machine, (2) local and dedicated computing power within the terminal, and (3) a machine intelligence.”

“Machines that poll information from many designers and inhabitants, directly view the real world, and have a congenial dialogue with one specific designer are architecture machines. They hint at being intelligent machines.”

Excerpts from Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro (2013)

I’d like to hear more discussion about how technology changes the process of drawing and making the built environment, rather than just what it can achieve once the work is complete. Decades of augmented reality debate has focused on the layering of data over the surface of finished buildings and spaces, but not how that data might have been better woven into the process of drawing and modeling it in the first place. I don’t think Schumacher’s Parametricism counts. I want to hear about the relationship between the machine and the architect in the visceral, physical, painful way del Toro describes it above. I want my design Mecha to do battle with my client’s Keiju.

I want a mutually interruptible neural bridge. Now that we’ve lost Iain Banks and The Culture I fear I’ll have to make do with Google Glass instead.

Why isn’t anyone talking about what it’s like to draw while wearing Google Glass? After all, if I only wear it when looking at my sketchbook I might be less of a Glasshole.

Posted in CAD, cinema, drawing, scifi, theory, video | Tagged bim, film, glass

metamatter that matters

By Rob on June 29, 2013

This week I was invited by Birmingham City Council to talk at their Sustainability Forum meeting about our experience of environmental design challenges and the 2016 zero carbon goal. Sadly, the idea that the sector might be in a position to deliver zero carbon buildings consistently 3 years from now is laughable, but the drive towards something better than what we currently have must nevertheless continue and work done by groups such as this are crucial in the face of ongoing legislative delays from the top. Rather than present slides about our projects I decided to offer some more strategic ideas that we need to keep talking about.

After a brief introduction in which I (as usual) encouraged the audience to seek out supporting texts such as Dan Hill’s ‘Dark Matter and Trojan Horses’ (see also previous post: Institutionalised), I offered the following 10 ideas over the course of 20 slides in a Pecha Kucha format. It was a refreshingly mixed audience made up of the public, contractors, manufacturers, clients and consultants so the topics were varied and I hope there was a little something for everyone. If you’re in the sector or already engaged in the debate in anyway, much of the topics below will be familiar or even obvious to you but hopefully the members of the group took away a few new ideas for discussion and an enthusiasm for alternative presentation techniques.

Of course the subtext here was simply to highlight the need to talk about the politics of low carbon building and the dark matter that swirls around it, rather than the architecture itself, which seemed even more pertinent for an event held in the heart of the city’s council building.

Strategies for sustainable building:metamatter that matters

1. narrow the performance gap

  • better design assessment tools – BIM, PHPP
  • greater control of construction detailing
  • plain English operating manuals and buildings that just work

2. fabric first trade skills

  • the next generation needs to understand better building techniques
  • teach trades about basic building physics… super insulation, triple glazing, zero thermal bridges
  • air tightness + mechanical ventilation

pro-clima

3. creative tenure mixes

  • mobilize self builders – widen house type options
  • develop cohousing opportunities to reduce resource consumption
  • compare on-site zero carbon autonomy vs. citizenship

4. creative procurement strategies

  • increase long term responsibility – design, build, maintain?
  • tighten performance specification demands
  • find cost savings in process rather than product

5. energy monitoring

  • measure actual performance as standard – test new RIBA Plan of Work ‘In Use’ service?
  • always share results – good or bad
  • demand contractors and consultants offer this service

6. natural materials

  • invest in materials with better health and energy credentials
  • design for ‘breathable’ vapour permeable construction
  • reduce dependency on oil economy based products

7. lifecycle costing

  • measure long term performance of design decisions
  • include associated impacts to living costs – fuel poverty, rent stability
  • test for alternative economic futures, climate change and fuel costsc-zero

8. non energy benefits

  • consider inter-departmental benefits
  • allow for recognised improvements to health and living quality
  • measure cost benefits of reduced health care and sick days

9. integrate low emissions transport

  • decarbonised grid future points to greater electric car usage?
  • charging points installed as standard on all new developments
  • or developments that include short term car loan systems eg. Car 2 Go

10. new build vs. old build?

  • Don’t underestimate importance of existing stock
  • 97% of building emissions are created by existing homes

Posted in environment, housing, ideas, passivhaus | Tagged pechakucha, strategy, sustainability

The avoidance of doing architecture

By Rob on June 4, 2013

The Philosophers Magazine interviewing Nigel Warburton of Philosophy Bites podcast – with a minor adjustment in bold by me:

“A lot of professional philosophers architects lack the imagination required to think about what it’s like not to understand something. Some have got into a complacent habit of speaking to each other in a kind of technical language, which is almost at times the avoidance of doing philosophy architecture. They’re part of a culture of people who always say the same things and make the same moves: just making finer and finer discriminations between whether they’re a particular kind of materialist or a particular kind of functionalist. People stake out little claims. When faced with the need to explain what they’re doing and why it should be of interest to anyone at all outside of that culture, many flounder.

“Not the best ones, interestingly. The really significant philosophers architects are able to explain with superb clarity precisely what it is that matters about a topic. Not just for others with similar interests but for anybody who might be concerned with philosophy architecture at all. Weaker philosophers architects hide behind a series of coded nods and winks to each other. This often betrays a lack of clarity of thought.”

I can also recommend the most recent episode on analytic vs continental thinking for a similar what-if-this-were-about-architecture exercise.

Posted in architecture, podcast, theory | Tagged philosophy, quote

Institutionalised in the Black Maria

By Rob on March 15, 2013

Notes made on the 22:30 from Euston to Birmingham, whilst returning home to the provinces after treating myself to an evening of presentations and discussion with Dan Hill, Jeremy Till and Wouter Vanstiphout under the title Institutionalised…

Black Maria

Housed in the Black Maria installation at St Martin’s by Richard Wentworth/GRUPPE we were split into eager registrants who’d secured a ‘seat’ and lazy laggards who just turned up to freeload by taking a chair outside the installation and behind the projection screen. Proceedings get underway with the barrier between us raised and the talk show hosts/guests in the middle, then at the appointed moment when sufficient teasing has taken place, the screen falls (to the sound of a jet aircraft landing) and we become the privileged few allowed sole rights to the speaker’s attention and slides that are the right way round, whilst the rest get only sound piped through speakers and reversed images and text. It’s a privilege that is later slightly sullied by the numbness of our arses as they complain about the unforgiving plywood steps we’re sitting on. The fact that Richard Wentworth himself chose to sit on the chairs outside should have told us something perhaps.

Black Maria

It’s a beautiful thing though, and perhaps the very embodiment of what would during the evening be discussed as the conflict between the teaching of craft and ethics. Carefully crafted as it is to disrupt the usual ethics of oratory; thereby straddling both concepts perfectly.

The evening is introduced by Shumi Bose and the speakers are described as one qualified architect (Till) and two people who inhabit the ‘extended field of architecture’ (Hill and Vanstiphout). It’s this extended field that is of course the primary focus for the evening and a topic ripe for exploration in the UK at the moment given the widely discussed/lamented state of the profession and it’s utter lack of direction or worth. How does a mindful awareness of this extended field allow architecture to work within, against or for institutions?

Here are some (crudely paraphrased) sound bites and notes from each:

Jeremy Till – institutional irritant

1) provides a short intro and begins by reading the founding definition of the RIBA (quoted in his book Architecture Depends), part of which can be paraphrased thus: ‘architects are to be the arbiters of taste’ and he then states that this institute’s position is only legitimised by the support of other institutes i.e. universities.

2) he criticises architecture for becoming a spatial projection of imagination (or does he? see footnote)

3) acknowledging his position in the large institute of St Martin’s he describes himself as the institutional irritant that seeks to disrupts from within, but acknowledges that the more effective position may be on the outside

Wouter Vanstiphout – architect as figurehead

4) describing background and past work Wouter talks of his Design as Politics course

5) which leads to later studies on the politics of urban riots and the question of whether the fabric of the city itself is an accessory to the violence with the architect ultimately to blame

6) he proposes that the reason for this is in fact because architecture has merely become the visible garnish/figurehead/tip of the iceberg for the (massive) process of (brutal) urban renewal
beneath or behind it driven by institutions such as the state or the market.

7) underlining the power of the market he shows a picture of a city skyline filled with large buildings by internationally renowned architects, highlighting that their existence/creation is/was
dependent not on the people who inhabit them but the market that requires investment objects

Dan Hill – boundary operator

Black Maria 3

8) Dan starts by reflecting Wouter’s iceberg by showing Papenek’s triangular diagram with the designer’s share taking only a small proportion of the real problem beneath

9) he questions the ability of yesterday’s institutions to produce the necessary outcome for tomorrow

10) showing examples of projects from his time at Sitra and HDL he explores various examples of the networked city

11) suggesting that activity undertaken by a city’s inhabitants are less important for the actions themselves rather than the ability to make networked decisions about what to do

12) in turn suggesting that the culture of public decision making is the design challenge

13) and that in this networked city the government now has competition

14) thus returning to the question of whether 19th century institutions are capable of facing 21st century problems

15) Dan suggests that the experience he’s had in three different organisations of different roles and scales could be described as inside, outside and (during his time at Sitra) at the boundary of key institutions

16) in summary the goal should be to design the conditions that allow institutions to address meaningful public issues


Each had touched on a question of position relative to the institution or institutions that determine one’s role. Jeremy began by questioning whether it’s better to disrupt from within or beyond, Wouter described the dangers of unwittingly becoming a figurehead for the institution behind you and Dan demonstrated what might be possible at the boundary between the two. I think these positions were further contextualised by comments during the discussion at the end of the evening when Wouter (expanding on his comments about market driven investment objects) questioned the possible conflict of loyalties between the direct source of funding from a client vs. the city in which the work is carried out. How do you maintain the balance between civic responsibility and client loyalty? Following that a question from a planner in the audience about the panel’s view on how the UK’s NPPF and debate on localism might impact the institution brought an acknowledgement of the value of the neighbourhood forum. In there somewhere there were also comments about the market of supply and demand that suggested that the profession concerns itself too much with the supply side, when in fact it should work harder to raise and support the demand.

Neighbourhoods – the demand market – are the boundaries to institutions in which an architect’s loyalties must be invested.

It’s fitting then that the following 24 hours of media coverage in the UK built environment has provided much coverage of a growing interest in the power of self build and co-housing ideas and it’s certainly helping me form ideas about which direction I’d like to head in future with my practice.

Finally, I’d like to end by recording a wonderfully succinct and compelling description of the perils of what Wouter described as the neo-liberal myth of the benefits of rolling back the state. Rather than the space left over being filled by the common man, it’s simply claimed by the private market instead.

Horse meat lasagne anyone?

* Note: I appear to have heard Jeremy’s comment on the projection of spatial imagination entirely differently to the fellow on my left, Charles Holland off of FAT who wrote it down properly:

Institutionalised

Posted in architecture, notes, theory | Tagged art, lecture, theory | 5 Responses

100 stick house

By Rob on January 22, 2013

The beginnings of an idea for a structure built within the rules of UK domestic permitted development, consisting of exactly the same size timber section/length throughout and well suited to standard timber sheet sizes for cladding. Shown here in 3 repeating bays and resulting in 100 x 4.2m long sticks. Well, 99 in fact but it’s not a bad idea to have a spare is it?

Perhaps worth developing and offering details under a Creative Commons license…

home4self - 100 stick house

Posted in architecture, design, drawing, ideas | Tagged creativecommons, home4self, structure

Forms that add distance

By Rob on January 17, 2013

Blogging dogged eared thoughts – some loose, coincidental noticings that deserve recording…

I’m looking forward to seeing some of Hadid’s work further iterated in the future by the algorithms delivering Google Earth’s Universal Texture. It’ll feel like an event horizon in which Parametricism Will Eat Itself. Better yet, if the pirate copy in China gets completed, photographed and rendered by the machines of loving grace first then the copy of the copy might well be such a sublime example of Shumacher’s autopoiesis that we’ll be able to declare Architecture a done deal and move on.

Mind you, there’ll always be guys like Piers Gough to prevent us getting too lost in the new aesthetic by deploying a critique firmly rooted in the old aesthetic:

“The practice seems fond of these etiolated forms that add to distance rather than subtract from it.”

That’s good, isn’t it? Add to distance rather than subtract from it. I’ve been thinking about it all week and whilst doing so I stumbled across this in Ruskin’s Modern Painter’s on the subject of depth of field:

“Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving anything like completeness to the forms of the near objects. This is not done by slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice in art,) but by a decisive imperfection, a firm, but partial assertion of form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon, or cling to, nor entirely understand, and from which it is driven away of necessity, to those parts of distance on which it is intended to repose.”

Decisive imperfection and a partial assertion of form is what Piers was looking for I think.

It’s fitting that the copy of Modern Painter’s I found that in was bought from a second hand bookshop in Derbyshire last year during an event called Laptop & Looms in which I had the pleasure of meeting the folks from Makie Lab and spending the afternoon building a Makerbot. You’ve probably heard of them, they’re one of the few firms actually doing something interesting with 3D printing and rapid overnight production. Except perhaps for the guys rapid prototyping the copy of Hadid’s building in China.

Look what happens when you take the Makie Lab about page and switch the word toys for buildings:

“… a system of creating objects using game technologies – 3D Studio Max, Unity, 3D objects – and transmogrifying them into 3D-printable buildings complete with internal working joints. Which means we can model buildings then manufacture buildings, overnight.”

Perhaps Schumacher should have gone for transmogrifycism instead.

Posted in architecture, ideas, notes, theory | Tagged theory

home4self

By Rob on December 8, 2012

I’m nearing the end of the design process for home4self – always a good time to revisit the original sketches.

Posted in design, drawing, home4self, housing | Tagged home4self, housing, self-build

Next »