Sadly, I can’t do Tuesday evenings. Who’s going to go on my behalf and blog about it?

ecoterrace.co.uk

The goal is to substantially increase the environmental performance of the properties and help take part in the progress of the national debate about the importance of improving the quality of the country’s existing housing stock.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project will be the post-occupancy monitoring work we will be completing in collaboration with the guys from Hockerton Housing Projects. In a couple of years time we will hopefully have something valuable to say about the actual results of some of the design techniques and products, as well as an understanding of what it’s like to live in a property like this.

I’ll be covering it in more detail here soon, but if you tune into Radio Stoke this morning at 11:20 GMT (it’s available over the web) you’ll hear my colleague Mike Menzies give a brief interview about the project out on site.

(thanks to Adam Freetly from ArchGFX for his help on the WordPress tweaking and Mat Brown from moblog.co.uk for input on the phonecam RSS… now I just have to create some content!)

BLDGBLOG: There also seems to be a huge reliance today on extra-architectural theory, like Gilles Deleuze. But if students were instead locked in a room with some science fiction novels, or even a comic book, it might actually stir up some new ideas. At the very least, science fiction actually addresses architecture. So perhaps the problem is one of reference? Or even of genre? Or just specifically Deleuze?

Wigley: To cut to the chase, if it’s a choice between being locked in a room with a science fiction book or being locked in a room with Deleuze, go for the science fiction book, for sure. No doubt about it. But that’s not a choice against theory – because, in fact, science fiction is an incredibly important mode of theorizing about technology and about space, and the people who produce science fiction are often incredibly canny theorists.

So the problem in the current discussion about theory is that when people say theory they really mean a particular thing. For example, when you say: what do I think about the use of these extra-architectural theories? That makes sense only if we know what architecture is. In fact, what’s so exciting about architecture is that its limits are not clear. It’s a way of thinking; it’s not a fixed territory. In a way, you can reach what seems a long way away – to somebody like Deleuze – in order to get a feel for how those limits are moving. At certain moments in time, Deleuze might seem to be totally inside the limits; at other moments, he might seem a long way away – but that’s not necessarily a move toward or away from theory. Mies’s famous saying: build, don’t talk. Well, that’s a theoretical statement. He had a theory about practice. It’s amazing how many people quote him saying that – they quote a piece of theory against theory.

The more important question is: which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction? I, myself, would like to be locked in a room with a science fiction book – but that’s just me. Someone else would like to be locked in a room with Deleuze, and generate some thinking for architects that seems much more urgent and seductive and accurate. And somebody can read science fiction and come up with trash – I mean, there’s a lot of junk science fiction out there, and there’s a hell of a lot of bad architecture out there, too.

But I think it’s great that people are reading different books now than they were reading five years ago. There’s no subject an architect won’t talk about. And that sort of restless promiscuity is entirely positive. What’s interesting is that architects have often been informed by a very precise theory, whether technological or political or scientific and so on; but we also learn a lot by just paying attention to the seemingly ordinary details of the city around us. And architects are fantastic at stitching ideas to objects. That’s what we’re really good at.

Architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders.

Which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction?

This week I ‘ave been mostly constructing a 4 dimensional project program charting the route of the smooth space of the drawing as it passes through the striated space of tasks, people and landscape.

Next week I’d better reach for some science fiction.

Carefully crafted thoughts formalized by the act of writing for an audience. Exactly the justification for blogging that I was explaining to my students last week.

A quote from the latest entry:

The forms of the Industriosphere have not pulled themselves into being, they have been put together by human beings through trial and error. They are not innocent, and it serves us to be as skeptical of their claims to functional autonomy as we are about claims to formal autonomy that set the terms of the discipline’s other discourses*.

Bonus: by crikey, the guy can really draw too

(*Rod: that last link is for you re. our recent e-mailing!)

First, a couple of links to recent artforum.com articles.

Hello,

I’m writing to point out to you two articles from the February issue of Artforum now online. One offers Yale art historian Sean Keller’s take on the renovations of Mies’s Crown Hall at IIT and Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery. The other is artist Josiah McElheny’s musings on architect Josef Hoffmann’s interiors, timed to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie.

I would be flattered if you’d consider linking to either article (or both).

The February Artforum Table of Contents: artforum.com/inprint/issue=200702
Keller’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12384
McElheny’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12385

All three links are to their permanently-accessible URLs. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Best wishes,
Brian

Next, more news on the Human League album cover graphics from Jack at submitresponse.com.

Ah, that’s why they’re familiar! I’d have to dig through a ton of boxes to check, but I seem to remember Pritt Stick-ing a photocopy of that particular dancing couple onto the cover of the master copy of a fanzine about 12 years ago.

It’s a single, rather than an album, though, and there’s two versions of the sleeve – the original 1978 issue on Fast has more architectural illustrations on the back, along with lyrics, the 1982 Virgin/EMI just has the songs listed on the back. (I know this because I really want a first pressing 1978 copy, the one in mono with black and white labels, but only have a French 1982 reissue, ‘produit et realisé par The Human League’. Sad, eh?)