no2self.net

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.

John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 – books and building – according to Mr Giedion.

The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb a little upsetting. Nevertheless it’s a useful reference with many projects that deserve further investigation. I’ll be adding notes and links in the coming months to a wiki page: no2self.net/wiki. Feel free to edit it as well.

• 1856-1867 The Public Squares of Paris – Alphonse Alphand
• 1857-1860 Central Park, New York – Frederick Law Olmsted
• 1882 The Linear City – Arturo Soria y Mata
• 1889 The Art of Building Cities – Camillo Sitte
• 1898 Garden Cities of Tomorrow – Ebenezer Howard
• 1901 The Industrial City – Tony Garnier
• 1901 Housing Legislation in Holland
• 1915 Cities in Evolution – Patrick Geddes
• 1920 Welwyn Garden City, England – Raymond Unwin
• 1922 Plan Voisin, Paris – Le Corbusier
• 1927 Weissenhof Housing Project, Stuttgart
• 1927 Roemerstadt, Frankfort – Ernst May
• 1928 Dammerstock Housing Project, Karlsruhe – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Siemenstadt, Berlin – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Radburn, New Jersey – Henry Wright and Clarence Stein
• 1929 The Neighbourhood Unit – Clarence Perry
• 1933 The “Charte D’Athenes” – CIAM 4
• 1934 Broadacre City – Frank Lloyd Wright
• 1935 La Ville Radieuse – Le Corbusier
• 1938 Culture of Cities – Lewis Mumford
• 1944 The Greater London Plan – Patrick Abercrombie
• 1945 Saint-Die, Vosges, France – Le Corbusier
• 1948 Harlow New Town, England – Frederick Gibberd
• 1948 Chimbote, Peru – P.L.Wiener and J.L.Sert
• 1951 Chandigargh, Punjab, India – Le Corbusier
• 1951 The Core of the City – CIAM 8
• 1952 Vallingby, Sweden – Sven Markelius
• 1953 Back Bay Center, Boston, Massachusetts – Walter Gropius and others
• 1956 Alexander Polder, Holland – R.Bakema and Group OPBOUW
• 1956 Southdale Shopping Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota – Victor Gruen
• 1956 Lafayette Park, Detroit, Michigan – Mies van der Rohe
• 1957 Brazilia, Brazil

And then the book was published in 1958. So where do we go from there? Answers on a postcard please, I’m off to compile a list from 1958 onwards.

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.

First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.

So, from the bottom up¹:

I’m going to keep these up for as long as I see other blogs in this industry complaining about what a career in architecture is really like outside the cozy world of academia. Too many posts these days about how rarely you actually get to Design, or how undervalued the client makes you feel, or how rubbish everyone else is.

Cheer up you miserable buggers², your career is what you make it.

Next a repost of summer reading and listening suggestions that Phil Clark at Building magazine asked me to help with. You can see many more on his original post.

Books:

100 Houses 100 Architects: Editor – Gennaro Postiglione

Refreshingly critical coffee table picture book that even has some
floor plans. Worth it for Till/Wigglesworth house alone. Euro-centric
cast list means it misses Charles Moore though.

Bay Area Houses: Editor – Sally Woodbridge

Making up for lack of Charles Moore in previous with this one. Perfect
case studies in beautiful suburban housing. Effortless English Arts
and Crafts sensibilities jump the turn of the last century Atlantic
and learn to loosen up in the Californian sunshine. Expect to see
timber shingles in my next project.

This Is A Man – Truce: Primo Levi

There’s a generation of Italian writers who cannot be surpassed. Well,
two at least – Levi and Calvino. Levi tells the story of his time in
Auschwitz and in doing so defines the furthest corners of every human
soul in history. Nothing can prepare you for the visceral contents.

Music

The Red Album: Weezer

Flawless grunge is an oxymoron. If that’s so this the best damn
oxymoron I ever heard. Another perfect album from the guys who started
with little more than a poorly knitted jumper. Includes an ideal
soundtrack for architects: ‘I Am The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’.
That was a joke. Maybe.

Seldom Seen Kid: Elbow

I’m praying with all my atheist might that Elbow don’t get struck by
the Mercury Music Prize curse. If they win we all have to promise not
to make a fuss and let them carry on crafting such heart stopping
moments of metaphysical revelation. Not to mention the moments of
(less-than-meta) physical revelation that you can scream along with
them perfectly; as long as you’re in the car on your own. With the
windows up.

Piazza, New York Catcher: Belle & Sebastian

A novel in one track. I think I finally ‘get’ Belle & Sebastian. Took
me bloody long enough.

notes:
1. ‘designing a house for myself…’ – watch this space, I’m currently making a bid for a plot of land
2. this month’s Monty Python quote quota has now been met. Next month: The Two Ronnies

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:

store.doverpublications.com/0486273512.html

store.doverpublications.com/0486257622.html

store.doverpublications.com/048628218x.html

store.doverpublications.com/0486243419.html

Radio 3 interviews are ripe for the picking of architectural metaphors.

In the time honoured blogging tradition of curating x and pointing out that it’s a bit like y, here’s a quote from Booker Prize winning author Anne Enright that got me thinking about spatial comparisons and architectural narratives (my emphasis).

A short story is a slight thing, the only thing it does is change the quality of the silence after the last line. Just a shift. Just a change. It doesn’t have to be epiphanic, it can be metaphorical, it can be a change of weather. I’m quite interested in slight changes. I like the silence after a fly has flown out of the window. That kind of change. That’s a lovely and subtle thing if you can catch that.

My overarching concern is with the shape of the thing. And also with keeping it moving, I like the sentences to move, I like lives to move, I want fluidity, I want a kinetic thing. It’s like a poet wants the poem to move and be still at the same time. I’m interested in getting the sentences around corners, and I’m interested in getting the light to change, and I’m interested in them not being fixed, that’s when I say that they have these free running minds – these people. So whatever happens, good or bad, happy or unhappy, to me isn’t as important as the shifts.

(see also: John Tusa interviewing Edmund De Waal transcribed on no2self1.0 and my brief entries on Walsall Art Gallery for examples of those shifts.)

John Hill over at Archidose has tagged me with this refreshingly simple meme.

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

John’s Gibson quoting choice talks of ‘…the hopes of maintaining any semblance of longterm autonomy over our fates…’ and the book nearest me seems to fit nicely into the theme of controlling fate as well as the very title of this blog.

Like the double action of the human heart, the heartbeat of the universe implies duality, a cosmic pulse, an alternation of in-breathing and out-breathing, of manifestation and rest. To the Buddhist good and evil are relative and not absolute terms. The cause of evil is man’s inordinate desires for self.

from Buddhism by Christmas Humphries, first published 1951

I like the phrase manifestation and rest. It’s been duly noted for future use as a spatial/temporal description.

I hereby tag:

Avril Korman
Fred Scharmen
Owen Hatherley
Rod Mclaren
Ralf Zeigermann

The final part of the story about the design of half a dozen houses in the West Midlands…

The next day, exhibition and obligatory drink with fellow bloggers over, I headed back to the office. As I’m recounting to colleagues the story of my discovery of a reference to a similar housing layout in the pages of a seventy year old book called Europe Rehoused, I look over to the book shelf as I’m speaking to find the very book in question looking back at me. I’d been sat next to it for nearly ten years without even realizing it was there.

The text doesn’t expand on the specific house types shown, focusing rather on the general urban design climate in Sweden at the time; but the extra info on the plans provided was reassuring. We were in agreement about fundamental room positions and relationships, regardless of slightly changing space criteria since these examples were first designed. I pressed on with the design and the preparation of a planning application that would take the chevron approach to housing layout from Sweden in the early 20th Century to Stourbridge in the early 21st.

A full set of images can be seen here: Queens Road, Stourbridge

(the images shown are taken from the initial 3D modelling work – the wind turbines shown were subsequently removed due to concern about cost and their likely poor performance in an urban area)

A full copy of the design and access statement is available as a PDF: Saw-tooth housing. As well as street elevations and a video on Vodpod.

I’m delighted to report that it got full support by the planning department, the design and access statement (including a reference to Europe Rehoused) is, I’m told, to be cited as a model example for the borough, and the construction is now about 80% complete. I’ll post some pictures when the scaffold comes down. If you want to buy one and get on the property ladder with the help of a shared ownership agreement, get in touch with Black Country Housing.

I’ve described this project in some length for a couple of reasons, firstly because I think it makes for an interesting snapshot of how we work (let’s call it an extension to my previous post: a day in the life), but most importantly because it confirmed a growing concern I’ve had for the last few years about the trajectory of contemporary housing design in the hands of architects of my generation.

Almost overnight, practices everywhere have started to look for opportunities to add housing projects to their CVs. For a multitude of reasons – economic boom, media attention, McCloud, housing need, keyworker and cost of living debates, environment concerns – housing is once again the word on everyone’s lips.

Here’s the rub: Find me an architect of my generation (I’m 32) that had an education with housing design on the curriculum. I’m guessing you can’t. Only very recently am I beginning to hear about it re-appearing on the agenda in schools of architecture. Next, combine that with the fact that the rebranding of housing as a core (and even cool) design skill has caused a lot of firms that may have traditionally sought glamour elsewhere to turn their hand to the plight of ‘keyworkers’ needing ‘affordable’ housing. The result, I fear, is the reason why over the last few years I’ve seen some worrying examples of projects that repeat the mistakes of the past.

I’ve stood in front of winning competition entries that could have been drawn 40 years ago. I’ve walked around completed schemes that have exactly the same problems as estates from the 50s that I was being encouraged – by residents – to tear down only the week before. I’ve seen worse on the cover of the AJ*.

A recurrent theme here has been (and will continue to be) the benefit I’ve received from the teaching I’ve had from those around me who’ve been here before and are still wearing the t-shirt. I’ll summarise this final post by recounting a question put to me by one of them when I left the school of architecture and started practicing…

Ask an architect to design a Panda compound in a zoo and they’ll go away and spend months researching their habits, needs and precedents before they dare put pencil to paper. If you ask them to design a house for their grandmother, how long do you think they’ll spend on research?

You’re a human, right? You’ve lived in a house? What more do you need to know? If my experience with just this modest scale project alone is anything to go by, the answer is plenty more.

Screw the pandas, they’re too lazy to even procreate anyway.

—–Notes:
* Not, I hasten to add, during the reign of Kieran Long and the lovely new housing friendly AJ.
(see also Part 1 + Part 2)

Proving that blogging can be a slow medium too, here’s the second part to an entry written almost a year ago…

December 2006, London, RIBA HQ. Flicking through the pages of the book to accompany the Eric Lyons exhibition at the RIBA, I send a text to Rod: In the RIBA cafe, muffins are terrible. A quaint, pre-twitter messaging technique that now seems obscenely intrusive.

Not all muffins you understand, just these ones, in that moment. Taking the edge off an otherwise enjoyable exhibition. Criticized in reviews, fairly I think, for being little more than a version of the book blown up and pasted on the wall, I was nevertheless glad I made the trip to see for myself. Sedate, linear, easy to follow, suburban even, I made the most of having the time to soak it up slowly; something that my parental duties usually prevent me from doing.

Colleagues had recommended I look at Lyons after I designed a project that reminded them of his work (see part 1). Pouring over the images on the wall I certainly had to (proudly) admit there were moments when we spoke in the same suburban dialect; the same vernacular language, but a direct reference didn’t jump out at me.

Until I opened the book. Muffin in one hand, page 30 in the other, I found the connection.

And, not for the first time, I had to admit that without the benefit of input from older, wiser colleagues I would have continued to believe that I’d reinvented the wheel. The image shown in the brilliant essay by Alan Powers is taken from a book published in 1938 called Europe Rehoused and is cited, along with the work of Trystan Edwards, as a likely influence on the young Lyons. Shades of it can perhaps be seen in the plans for New Ash Green or Templemere.

I wonder with increasing regularity, how often my peers, currently finding their feet in senior positions in offices across the UK are fortunate enough to be directed to moments like this. Helped, gently through the Total Persepective Vortex of housing design history and reminded of where we’ve come from.

Humbled and reassured I went back to the exhibition with Rod (and his camera) and before long we homed in on the drawings. All two of them. This is where the exhibition missed out, there simply wasn’t enough drawings. Surely there are piles of them in storage somewhere?

I’ve been thinking about this drawing and the importance of landscape to Lyons work ever since.

Continuing the theme of slow blogging, I offer it to Sue Thomas from Writing and the Digital Life as a possible answer to her question from December 2006: “How might one build a physical groupspace for work and leisure according to Web 2.0 principles?”

The answer is found in landscape. The communal spaces between the private thresholds of the Span houses engender social networking. There’s no need for me to expand on this further because, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, it’s already been written up for me. Look:

He placed three basic principles at the heart of the Span projects:

• community as the goal
• shared landscape as the means, and
• modern, controlled design as the expression.

Many developments focus only on the creation of private domestic space – they treat the area beyond the front door as incidental.

But Eric Lyons turned this on its head. Each development found ways of building the homes around central or shared green spaces. The architect’s aim was to engineer a sense of community by forcing people to interact.

from the BBC article: A house like no other?

Treat Span as interchangeable with web 2.0 and Eric Lyons as interchangeable with your favourite interaction designer and you’ll see what I mean.

Could there be a relationship between the form of the media we are using and the wide ranging appeal of some of the sites that curate the analogous topic? Landscape, blogging, topography, delicious, geology, fffound, urbanity, flickr – medium and content seamlessly linked.

Do you hang out with architects? Need a reading list to help you get by at parties? Don your black roll neck jumper and tuck a few of these in your satchel. Here’s the latest update to the chart of most commonly shared books over at the librarything.com group, Architext:

Most commonly shared books (weighted): What is architecture? : an essay on landscapes, buildings, a… by Paul Shepheard (10), Towards a new architecture by Le Corbusier (17), Delirious New York : a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan by Rem Koolhaas (14), Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi (12), Small, medium, large, extra-large : Office for Metropolitan … by Rem Koolhaas (13), The image of the city by Kevin Lynch (14), Theory and Design in the First Machine Age by Reyner Banham (9), The poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard (17), Learning from Las Vegas – Revised Edition: The Forgotten Sym… by Robert Venturi (11), Experiencing architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen (10)

Some more entries chosen from the archives. Influential ideas from people and pages…

People

• Enthusiasm for tomorrow (RIP Tony Goodall)
• Memorial speech for my friend and mentor
• Concrete Ideas (Denys Lasdun)
• Chairs and the architects that sat in them
• Letters on meditation (Matt Webb)
• Learning how to let go
• Wayne Jacobs (Wayne Hemingway)
• Letter to the AJ about Wayne Hemingway lecture
• Death of a Drawing Board (Tony Goodall)
• Accepting the fate of the parallel motion
• 1977 AD (RIP Ralph Erskine)
• Scan from 70s magazine
• 3 part entry on OMA lecture (Ole Scheeren)
• Thoughts of presentation about CCTV
• John Tulsa interviews Edmund de Waal
• Highlights from fascinating interview with potter
• Cueva Man (Tom Booker)
• Cave renovation in south-east Spain
• Lesson of movement (Oscar Naddermier)
• Notes from my year 1 history class
• Terrible Architect (Joe Satriani)
• There’s no space, man

Books

• Book Baton
• The only useful blog meme in history
• Chambers for a Memory Palace
• Charles Moore and Donlyn Lyndon
• Waking up to Nemo
• The web works – finding out about Windsor McCay from fellow bloggers
• What is Architecture?
• Review of book by Paul Shepheard
• Time and the Hunter
• Joint review with Peter at tesugen.com
• How to look at buildings
• Thoughts from the wonderfully named, Darcy Bradell