no2self.net

Tonight at 18:09, Pillow Fight Club II.

• Holmes on the radio
  

  ‘…Sherlock Holmes stories have been a part of radio programming since 1930. There are some 600 broadcasts listed on this site…’

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

• Tijuana Christmas (mp3s)
  

  …to help everyone at the Wolves LUG enjoy a Merry Christmas…(posted as an apology for failing to attend the xmas bash!)

• Flickr: Architecture
  

  Group photo pool

• TinyP2P
  

  ‘…TinyP2P is a functional peer-to-peer file sharing application, written in fifteen lines of code, in the Python programming language…’ (via boingboing.net)

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

• Rail plan safe as architect [Will Alsop] is axed
  

  ‘…The renowned architect behind ambitious £350 million plans to redevelop Birmingham New Street Station has been taken off the project….’

• Will Alsop’s new children’s centre
  

  ‘…has its own ‘big top’, water garden and outdoor stage. It’s a ray of light in a dark corner of London, says Jonathan Glancey…’

• The Freelance Hairdresser
  

  mash up mp3s – knees up, look sharp (dizzee rascal vs chas ‘n’ dave) is absolute bloody genius

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

My timing is a little off. I chose to launch the extra image RSS during
the same week that
moblogUK had the mother of all disc failures. It’s all fixed now and
you shouldn’t have to see the image the repeats any longer. I knew we’d
get there in the end.

Either I’m getting weaker, or banana skins are getting stronger.

Tonight’s entry is inspired by my previous comments about Oscar Naddermier, my first architectural history lecturer. I returned to his notes and decided that they should be shared with you. Oscar preferred his students to be listening rather than writing, so he always typed out his notes himself and issued them at the start of the lecture. The next hour would be filled with wonderful slides of seminal, iconic, important architecture from all over the world; all of which he’d personally photographed. We could never quite decide on Oscar’s age but when he once told us that during his education he had met Edwin Lutyens, we knew he was passing on many years of wisdom.

A great teacher, greatly missed. Here’s a piece by him called The Lesson of Movement. It seemed the most fitting since we were previously looking at action and reaction.

Architecture Movement is the dynamic element of accommodation, the first business of a building, and is seen to purpose in the contrasting characteristics of ‘Hall’ and ‘House’.

In ‘Hall’ the plan of progression and activity in movement is memorable in form and occasion, with assurance of safety. The architecture of ‘Hall’ will declare and fulfill this common expectation with the conviction of a work of art that works. ‘Hall’ is theatre, arena and the like where symmetry rules in the round or axially, with movement in reflective order which clearly establishes and refers to front, right, left and return, the vital orientation affecting communal intelligence in an assembly: safe dispersal depends on it.

‘House’ has infinite variety of arrangement in the shape and relationships of accommodation. There is progression from room to room in royal apartments and houses of parade, and in museums; and there are arterial corridors serving rooms in hotels, hospitals, schools. In dwellings, some are wholly of rooms opening off halls and landings; others combine rooms of privacy with a living space of open quality that integrates circulation.

Movement is as varied as human behaviour, and every age has manners in moving, giving it style; but the art of design is timeless in principles that shape form to induce and control this dynamic.

The empathy between movement and repose is a visible spirit in architecture.

I’ve turned this and two other pieces into PDF files (of inexplicably varying file sizes) so that you can enjoy them in their original format; The Lesson of Light, Utilitas, Firmitas et Venustas and The Lesson of Movement.

The RSS
problems continue. Normal service will resume shortly. I hope. If
anybody out there is a wizard with the planetplanet
aggregator, drop me a line.

Ahem. I’m an idiot. The reason the RSS wasn’t working correctly is because the redirect command I’d put in place was also redirecting the redirection, hence the repetition of images. In my defense, I’m an architect, not a geek.

Both feeds will remain in place but if you’d like to get images as well as text from this point on you’ll need to resubscribe to the new address: http://rob.annable.co.uk/rss20.xml.

The timestamp problem continues. For the moment we shall remain text only until I’ve got the photo feed to work.

• LamRim.com
  

  Tibetan Buddhist Internet Radio (via growabrain)

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

Marcus Fairs reviews the Marc Newson exhibition at the Design Museum in this month’s Icon magazine:

“Few designers change the visual language of everyday life – Marc Newson is one,” blathers the first of the wall texts in this mid-career retrospective. “He has transformed the design of the objects and spaces around us through his own work and his influence on other designers.”

…

[N]othing in this exhibition substantiates the bold statement at the entrance. It does not investigate Newson’s influence or place his work in a cultural movement. There is no critical perspective.

The show feels like a concession at Selfridges. At the entrance is a huge bas relief of Newson’s autograph.

About 6 months ago, sensing it would prove useful, I took this photo on a concession stand in Debenhams (just round the corner from Selfridges), it’s Newson’s Embryo chair.

The first time I saw a chair by Marc Newson was at the ’100% Design’ exhibition about 4 years ago. I think it was called the Orgone chair. I sketched it somewhere, I’ll try and dig it out and post it. I’d seen it in the press a lot over the preceding months and it was proving very popular. I dashed over to the stand to try it out and discovered to my horror that it was deeply uncomfortable.

So, when I saw the chair in the department store I had everything crossed in the hope that it would stand up to that rarely used test of designer chairs – actually sitting on it. I dashed over to the stand to try it out and discovered to my horror, again, that it was deeply uncomfortable.

Perhaps the fact that I’ve never seen a single picture of either chair with anybody’s arse anywhere near them, should have been a warning to me.

This isn’t an entry intended solely to lambast Newson. I’ve whined about chair design on this web site before and I don’t want it to become a habit. I mention it because the review in Icon magazine was useful to help me reflect upon the way I felt last week when I saw the Falb chair by Austrian designers BKM.

You need to look at it, click on the link…Done? Good. Beautiful, isn’t it? A chair you can hang your bag on with confidence. I spent the tram journey to work, the day after I’d first seen it, thinking about how it posessed undeniable character and wondering why that seemed such an attractive quality. It seemed like a good word to push around a little and see where we might end up. Later that day I realised that it had been planted there by the designers when I’d scanned the text describing the chair.

In order to take weight its right chair-leg makes a side-step. It show its individual character.

No matter. It had obviously left an impression on me for good reason. A thirty five minute tram journey later, the reason seemed to be this…

For the character of an object or person to be apparent it must be, or have been, dynamic in some form. Some action must take place in order for the qualitative assessment of its state in either past, present or future to take place (revisit what I said in a previous entry about dogs and Frisbees if you’re not sure what I mean about how the past and the future might also be visible). You can’t attach the word character to something that is static.

A quick define:character on Google provided, amongst other things, this: …the inherent complex of attributes that determine a persons moral and ethical actions and reactions. Or in reverse, a person’s actions make visible the inherent complex of attributes known as character. Interestingly, there was also a definition concerned with typography that caught my eye when describing the act of forming an object or space; a character is often in the form of a spatial relationship of adjacent or connected strokes.

A stroke is an action.

So how does this relate to a chair with an offset leg and an exhibition about Marc Newson? The Falb chair takes an action (or reaction, if you prefer to join the vector at the point where the person is moving towards the chair with bag in hand) in order to deal with the problem of its existence. How should one deal with the problem of being a chair?

From this vantage point it seems to me that neither Newson’s Embryo or Orgone chairs tackle that problem at all, at least not until very late in the process. Rather, the first thing they tackle is the problem of being a designer object born of the pen of a guy who has his autograph in huge bas-relief at the entrance to his exhibition.

Some final thoughts. I’m reminded at this point of something that my first architectural history lecturer, Oscar Naddermier, used to say when trying to sum up the success of a particular part of a building. For example, when showing a slide of the portico on the Pantheon in Rome he would say,

Now that says door.

Take another look at that Newson chair above and try saying, now that says chair. Doesn’t work does it? Also, if Oscar was still with us now he would probably quickly point out that I’ve just wasted a lot of people’s time explaining something that Louis Henry Sullivan said a long time ago, which was, ‘The solution resides in the problem’. You’ll have heard of him before, he’s the guy who also said that form follows function.

The empiricists among you will be itching to point out that I really need to go and sit on a Falb chair to make a fair comparison. Go ahead, your absolutley right, but I take some solace from the fact that the designer’s web site actually shows people using the chair to sit on.