no2self.net

• Extension Room :: del.icio.us
  

  ‘…This extension integrates del.icio.us into Firefox…’

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

You may remember from previous entries that I’ve been involved with the Birmingham School of Architecture, as both student and teacher, for many years. For the last few months there has been turmoil at the school following some poor results and press coverage that has done serious damage to it’s reputation.

I’ve just received this e-mail from Kevin Singh, Course Director of the post graduate diploma.

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great regret that I send this email but the Birmingham School of Architecture’s future is at severe risk.

I enclosed an edited version of a recent report from the University’s Vice Chancellor Dr Peter Knight which announces the disolving of the Faculty of the Built Environment. Several of the courses are being placed into another Faculty but the future of the School of Architecture is thrown into serious doubt.

The attachment has been edited for brevity but I have attempted to maintain the key points and I have highlighted the key sentences for your convenience but these include statements which are extremely worrying.

There is a suggestion that the School could move to the Art & Design Faculty which I guess most of us would welcome and place the school in a more design led environment. It is also a common belief that the School would thrive in a city centre location rather than at Perry Barr.

This revelation is apparently not related to the BA problems over the summer which I now feel are behind us. The working group report was released yesterday and copies are being made public.

As trusted colleagues who have always supported the school I am asking each and every one of you to write to the Chair of the Board of Governers as a matter of urgency. I don’t think I need to tell anyone how critical it is for us all that the City retains a school of architecture. We are also the only realistic provider of part time courses for many students and I know that several of you spend your employees here to study with us. The Part 3 course which many of you are very familiar with would almost certain be lost as well.

…

I appreciate that the school has had a turbulent recent history but I believe that many of you are aware the good work that is being done here by both staff and students but I urge you all to take action on this to save our school. I believe that another local Univeristy undertook a feasibility study on setting up a school of architecture and found it to be unviable - this suggests that it is unlikely for a school to be created if we lose the one we have. Please do not leave this to others - we need your help.

Please send letters of support to:-

Mr Paul Sabapathy
Chair of the UCE Board of Governers
2 Mulroy Road
Sutton Coldfield
West Midlands
B74 2PY

Finally I ask that you all spread this email as widely as you can to maximise on support.

Many thanks

Kevin W Singh RIBA
Course Director PG Diploma in Architecture
Birmingham School of Architecture & Landscape

You can download the attached report here (37K word doc).

If any of you care about architectural education (I know at least a few of my readers are architecture students), please read the document and respond.

The school has been underfunded and unsupported by the University for as long as I’ve been involved with it - I started in 1993. From the looks of the comments from the Vice Chancellor in the report, a decision to move the school into the city centre to join the Institute of Art and Design campus is being seen as an opportunity to question the value of the school. Unbelievebly, a proposal that many have wished for for years may now bring about the death of the school, since the Vice Chancellor suggests that architecture, the mother of all arts, isn’t that “…closely aligned to the design disciplines.”

I’m going to have to go away and think about that for a bit.

• Panchromatica: Libertarian Planning
  

  Ian highlights the key parts of a dialogue between Christopher Alexander and Bruce Snider (full article here: How we people can once again make our towns

• BBC - Radio 2 - Ken Bruce Session with Mark Knopfler
  

  live tracks including a sublime version of Brothers in Arms

• spiked-culture - Deconstructing Derrida
  

  ‘…Deconstruction was a method that spread from literary criticism, through cultural studies until it became so ubiquitous that you could buy a ‘deconstructed [ie. rumpled] suit’ in Camden, London, in the 1990s…’

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

Of error the house

to mobius,
a berkel van file.
Mp3, mvrdv,
an configuration line.

Ben flaxwood,
achaea studio,
un design.

Sap
and bittorrent calcs.

Webstat poetry. The top 25 search keywords for this site. Order unadjusted but punctuation added at my own discretion.

Your turn.

More notes from the Radio 3 interview…

On the relationship between the value of the material and the value of the product:

JT: You’ve said something about porcelain, but the fundamental material is clay, isn’t it? You’ve said that one of the fascinating things about clay is that people don’t know how to treat it in many respects, because what is it? It’s earth. We’re all human clay. It’s a base material. Has this never worried you?

EdW: Not remotely. Clay’s a very interesting material in that sense, in that it’s got no value at all. As it happens porcelain has got value, but no one really knows where it is in the hierarchy of materials. It’s very low.

JT: Just above lead perhaps?

EdW: Way down, in the sense that anyone can dig it. It’s free. A free material. It’s also, of course, a material that is part of our poetry in that clay and people go together very well indeed. We are earth, we are dust, we are shards. It’s part of the biblical resonance.

On the act of throwing a pot and the way it involves creating space both inside and outside ¹ the material:

JT: The thing about clay is that you’re constantly reworking it. If you don’t like where you’ve got to on the wheel, you just go back to the basic lump, don’t you?

EdW: Pretty much.

JT: That was put very crudely.

EdW: It’s only when you fire the pot; that’s the point of no return. Throwing pots is very interesting because it’s one of the great iconic images - the potters hands moving on the clay. It’s a very seductive image. Of course what you’re doing is making an inside and outside simultaneously, which doesn’t happen in very many places in art. You’re making a volume in a very short period of time. You’re creating an internal space.

JT: Back to your spaces and cathedrals? ²

EdW: Completely. So when you’re making a vessel - actually I really am only interested in vessels, that’s, for me, the most interesting thing about ceramics - when you’re making a vessel, every single touch of your hands after you’ve thrown the basic cylinder changes the interiority, the sense of internal space, completely. You can make twenty pots in a row and by just moving them ever so slightly each of them has a very different resonance, a very different sort of pitch.

1. see ‘Contextual Slippage and the Info Pimp Force Diagram’ for an alternative description of this condition
2. see part I

• cityofsound: MIT Stata Center
  

  a review of Frank Gehry’s new MIT building

• Bit Prepared 1: A Missing Link?
  

  ‘…Building the case for turning the Boy Scouts into a worldwide advocate of free software…’

• Bit Prepared 2: Richard Stallman Meets the World Scout Bureau
  

  ‘… Linux Community Richard Stallman from the FSF, Ray Saunders from the World Scout Bureau and the author discuss the connections between free software and Scouting philosophies….’

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

As promised, here’s the first notes from the Radio 3 interview of Edmund de Waal (EdW) by John Tusa (JT) at the weekend. It was a fascinating discussion and I want to get the key comments recorded here.

On the experiences that influenced him during childhood:

EdW: There was the interest of living next to cathedrals, it was a clerical family and so we lived next to some very, very good Gothic cathedrals and I think some of my early experiences of wandering through buildings and feeling different kinds of spaces were very, very important. I do remember being startled by how beautiful and interesting and odd a lot of the spaces in those cathedrals were. Those are some of my very earliest memories, so perhaps that something that fed into my feeling for objects.

JT: The spaces rather than the shapes?

EdW: Absolutely. The way in which you move, for instance in Canterbury cathedral … from very high spaces into the crypt, you descend into spaces or get trapped in spaces and then come out again into completely different volumes and that sense of how spaces can change atmosphere and spaces can change your emotions seemed to me something that was very interesting. I suppose that is something that does connect to pots quite directly.

On the subject of his early teacher and repetition:

JT: Why did he think that making 250 honey pots taught you anything?

EdW: Because there’s a very basic level of skill that is only acquired through repetition. It’s one of those truisms that’s very difficult to get round in ceramics because people make it into a moral law, but it seems self evident to me that the more objects you make of the same size, the same shape, the more attuned you get to slight differences. Your eye and your hand become more carefully attuned to difference.

On using porcelain; it’s unpredictable nature and the cultural baggage that can be embodied in a material:

JT: Give me a thumbnail difference of what working in porcelain is and what working in earthenware or stoneware is.

EdW: It’s a very plastic material, but it’s a very treacherous material, you have to work very quickly and decisively. It’s a very seductive material as well, very smooth and very beautiful; but the interesting thing is, when you fire it you can’t completely control the results. When you fire it to the temparatures I’m firing my porcelain to, it bends and warps and moves around. So you can’t make a perfect porcelain pot, or I can’t make a perfect porcelain pot. So what you’re dealing with is a material which is susceptible to gesture, how you handle it, to your movements around it …

Porcelain, for me, had all those somatic bodily experiences of being able to move the clay around in a new way. But also, porcelain is part of the great matrix of how culture has happened; it’s the silk road, it’s how pots have moved from the East to the West, it’s full of lots of different historical references.

• Kerrang! Radio 105.2 - Legends
  

  I’ve mentioned this station before, the latest news is that they’ve started a new stream that just delivers their ‘Legends’ show.

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

• Deconstruction icon Derrida dies
  

  RIP Jaques - see here for more

• Kings of Convenience mp3s
  

  found via stereogum

delivered (almost) daily at (almost) midnight via del.icio.us.

I had a delightful weekend enjoying the autumn at my parents house. The horse chesnut tree had dropped all it’s conkers but I climbed it anyway, swinging from the branches as the harvest went on below me.

A single apple remained on the apple tree so we claimed it before it fell to the ground and was carted off by the ants.

It’s time my kids learnt how to climb trees and it’s also time that they learnt how to play conkers, since it’s looking increasingly like it will be banned in the UK when they start school. Madness. We strung a few up and I took my best one to work this morning; it’s now a one’er after quickly dismissing it’s first opponent. Challenge me if you dare.

A book bought by my Mother at the local library provided this:

If I could be an architect
I’d draw up new designs
With ears and tails and curly bits
Not angles, corners, lines,
And then, instead of boring flats
And houses shaped like boxes,
We’d live in brick sheep, tiger towns
And rows of terraced foxes.

It’s from If Only by Richard Edwards, a children’s book of short poems along with ink illustrations by Alison Claire Darke. Mothers seem to be a running theme on this blog lately.

Craft has also been a theme of late, and this will continue in my next entry. This is merely an intermission, typed to pass the time as I record (ahem) the Radio 3 program about pottery and ceramics I heard on Sunday evening as I drove around Ironbridge in the dark, completely failing to find the hotel that was hosting Matthew’s wedding reception (sorry Matt!).

It’s an interview with Edmund de Waal about his career as a potter. The whole interview is brimming with Ideas and it crosses many of the fields of thought that I’ve journeyed across here over the last few months. I shall transcribe my favourite bits and post them over the next few days. In the meantime go and have a listen via the BBC’s ‘listen again’ feature.

When I’ve finished the typography course I think I shall take up pottery.