no2self.net

A timely post from the Staufenberger Repository on clip art as I prepare my Powerpoint for next week:

Includes an outrageous comment from me suggesting that my old letraset uploads were without precedent. In fact, the very opposite is true.

Patrick sent over the direct links for each of these fine collections:

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486273512.html

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486257622.html

http://store.doverpublications.com/048628218x.html

http://store.doverpublications.com/0486243419.html

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing a number of projects with a strong green agenda and I’m excited about the opportunity to get some comments and input from visitors.

Unfortunately, to my bitter disappointment, we weren’t included in this year’s paper catalogue. After a few moments of cursing and wondering whether to call it off for fear of lack of advertising I gathered my thoughts and realised I had a secret weapon: You.

Please, help me spread the word and flex my Google muscles a little. Pass it on, tell your friends, link me up – I’ve put an entry on the office web site with more details, please drop it into whatever blogging, bookmarking, digging, tumbling tools you have at your command:

Architecture Week Open Practice Day

Better yet, come and see me next week, I’d love to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Failing that, I have a shiny new digital whiteboard to play with and if you’re lucky I’ll get some biscuits in.

Continuing in the yearly tradition, I’ve picked out a few items (after the jump) from the Architecture Week events list for the West Midlands. Work your way through as many as you can and then come and tell me about them when you visit next Friday! Last year’s podcasts and Google Earth route is still available to help you find your way to the office.
Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve missed Janek Schaefer’s Vacant Space.

Fortunately, I visited on your behalf. ¹

A video installation at Birmingham’s MAC, it’s a white box containing 360 degree panoramic images of interiors projected on the wall. They scroll, scrape and judder past with transitions between images that feel like a fight for supremacy between the wildly different spaces depicted. Plug your headphones in to one of the sockets on the surface of the wall and the sound you hear is the mediator/referee/commentator for the fight. A random combination of field recordings of empty spaces creates a soundscape that is used to control the brightness, rotation speed and transition parameters of the photographs.

This averaged out soundscape becomes the lowest common denominator between physical space everywhere. A Normandy tool shed takes on Grand Central Station by projecting itself with noise. Environments previously imagined to be incomparable are not only held up against each other; the boundary between them is utterly destroyed as we glitch fade through the liminal space filled with the sound of the world banging into, whooshing past and running over itself.

It’s rather good.

Depending on which side of the Wigley line you stand on, this is either:

a) analogous to the Deleuze and Guattari refrain, explored through Proust and his descriptions of “…Vinteuil’s little phrases: they do not refer to a landscape; they carry and develop within themselves landscapes that do not exist on the outside.” ²;

or

b) the jaw clenching, cheek wobbling moment of brute force space/time bending that everybody’s favourite Hero, Hiro, goes through in an effort to chart his way clumsily through every single point in the universe simultaneously and travel mistakenly to a Normandy tool shed instead of Grand Central Station. ³

If you could see the look on my face right now you’d know which one I prefer.

Consider this part Deleuzian, part sci-fi influenced entry as a small offering to the crowds currently gathering at Storefront in New York for the Postopolis! event. Wish I was there!

Notes:
1. tip o’ the hat to D’log for pointing it out to me. D’log also notes that you can hear Schaefer talk about the project and see an example of the footage on this video: 10Mb mov)
2. A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari – Continuum Publishing 2004 – page 352
3. Hiro image via: OmarC

It’ll be a sad day here at no2self when I’ve finally made my way through all the shelves and boxes at the office and uncovered all the gems worth sharing with you. I suspect I’ve got some way to go yet though.

A special issue of the AJ from December 1986 called Drawing the Line – Hugh Cullum, Louis Hellman, Eric Parry, Richard Reid and John Winter talk about their favourite pencils:

(If I’m not mistaken, Hugh Cullum, having discovered the secret to eternal youth, has now swapped his pencil for a guitar and is currently touring the world under the name of Willy Mason)

Jonathan Jones in the Grauniad (via rodcorp, again!) on Serra and Gehry:

Serra is on video in a little cinema in Gehry’s museum, talking about how he loathes architects. But surely you must be grateful to Gehry, objects the interviewer. “Oh, yeah! I should be grateful!” says Serra. He goes on to assert that he draws better than Gehry – “and Frank would agree” – and to argue that architects are just plagiarists who cannibalise sculpture.

Jones carefully weaves his way through the tension between artist and architect, sculpture and building. Ending with a confidence that I dream of seeing more often in architecture criticism.

This is as good as it gets. If you don’t like this, you don’t like modern art. If you do, you must revere Serra.

As you might expect, I like the power behind the seemingly simple put down about drawing better than Gehry, and along the way he draws in comparisons with Borromini and Bernini. I was reminded of some other notes I’ve been meaning to move off the piece of scrap paper in my back pocket:

Quotes from Simon Schama’s immensely enjoyable series on BBC4 a few months ago, The Power of Art, taken from the episode on Rembrandt (chosen because they fit nicely over the landscape of entries I’ve been making about drawing and sketching over the last few years).

Here too, in his drawings, just a few summary lines here and there, that manage to conjure up an entire scene. It’s a huge compliment don’t you think? Making us his partner in completion. Giving us the benefit of the doubt that we wouldn’t want anything so boring as the literal details.

…

And just look at the sketchiness of the whole thing. He doesn’t care about finish any more. In fact, Rembrandt’s in the process of doing something which horrified academicians – he’s abolishing the difference between a sketch and a painting, and he does it for the subjects he cares most about.

Serra, Gehry, Rembrandt – just a few summary lines here and there.

Elsewhere in an entry about the impending MoMA Serra exhibition, Adam Greenfield talks about where those summary lines meet:

Torqued Ellipse even manages something I didn’t think anything or -one could pull off: it redeems the single most wretched thing on Manhattan’s skyline, the Chippendale crenelation on the pediment of Philip Johnson’s atrocious AT&T Building. When you stand just so in Ellipse, in the hour before dusk, the two circles rhyme, the enclosing curve of the sculpture coming neatly into alignment with the egregious Johnson. It’s a moment of grace that I very much doubt is accidental.

Check the comments for further links to images and a fascinating anecdote about the tension between Mies van der Rohe and Henry Moore.

As for me; I spent my morning drawing summary lines through a presentation that moved from drainage proposals, through circulation, to car parking, around planning law, past environmental physics, into self-sufficiency from office to garden, touching on renewable technology, arguing the current market conditions, imagining various future societal conditions, exploring funding recycling and the balance between scientific post occupancy research and anecdotal quality of life dividends. Ultimately demonstrating that after all that you could still swing a cat.

For someone who just cannibalises sculpture, I sure do make a meal of it.