no2self.net

I may not be the only one seeking support from the Bay Area idiom and the work of Charles Moore I mentioned yesterday. I opened today’s BD magazine to find a review by Ellis Woodman of a fantastic project by James Gorst and was struck immediately by its similarity with a Moore project I’d seen before.

I wasn’t quite correct. It turns out it was another architect’s work praised by Moore in an essay in the book Bay Area Houses; the 1960 Rubin House by George Homsey…

Moore’s description is a lesson in itself.

A splendidly paired down and precise world of space and light (especially of light), this house managed to be a clear diagram of itself, altogether modest, yet at the same time rich in its development of spaces.

A clear diagram of itself. Very interesting.

There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.

update:

Yep, enfronting it is:

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I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless referencing to Charles Moore. I’ve been wallowing in it for over a year. Let me explain.

I’m building a house. I’m attempting to be both client and architect and it’s not easy living this split personality. So I’ve been turning to seminal texts for support – comfort blankets if you like – wrapping myself in them at night and sharing a bath with them occasionally.

You’ll know the books I speak of – Poetics of Space, In Praise of Shadows, The Place of Houses to name but a few.

If you follow my twitter feed you’ll be heartily fed up with it by now. Elsewhere, more discretely, I’ve been noting stuff down for the last year and a half over at home4self.tumblr.com and over the festive season it finally started to fall into place. Gaston started talking to Charles, Junichiro got on better with Peter and the seeds of a home have begun to grow.

Of all the spirits I’ve called on though, it’s the ghost of Charles Moore that has been most supportive. The Place of Houses, written with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon is the best book on housing architecture I’ve got and the best book you should get. Its influence has been broad and many levelled; for example:

At Ecobuild last year I cited the ’saddlebag’ technique in my talk about passive solar and it me helped explore the social/spatial benefits of the bolt-on, extra space that sunspaces provide. A buffer zone of many uses that breaks social housing out of its tight regulatory framework and minimum/maximum room sizes.

After the Stirling Prize was announced it explained to me one of the reasons that I, like the judges, had decided who should win.

And with its words on ‘inhabiting’ in the closing chapter it found a new way to make me think about what I’d been trying to convey in past discussions about legibility and ownership.

The fundamental principle is that in places where people live all space should seem to belong to someone or something; space either should seem to be inhabited, as if it belonged to or could be claimed by particular groups of people, or should be understandable as part of a coherent larger order, such as the natural landscape or the traditional fabric of the town or system of altogether new urban spaces.

So if I get that all off my chest here on this blog then perhaps I can stop sounding like a broken record. I’ll be making no such promises over on home4self though, as I’ll no doubt need plenty of help from Moore and his colleagues to take the sketches you see there and work out the order of rooms, the order of machines and the order of dreams.

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

I found another one… Po-mo blast off!

Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:

Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture as communication – simply a matter of horizontal connections. And although the richness and variety of that communication – as proposed by Jencks – is far greater than that we’ve lately been offered, what seems to be missing is the way we feel about buildings – how light animates them and the breezes flow through them, and how they engage our bodies and give us a sense of where we are and cause our spirits to soar, as perhaps the spaces themselves soar.

Moving from the simple horizontal connections to the spaces that make our spirits soar is, I think, where Russell Davies is heading with his new schtick. Read on.

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s.

Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene:

During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely eschewed advertising, the covers became outlandish and featured Cedric Price, Archigram, Foster Associates, Buckminster Fuller, Royston Landau, Alvin Boyarsky, The Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck and some attractive ones too.

Another fascinating entry from a great blog, I encourage you to add it to your feed reader if you haven’t already. I’ll merely add the simple observation that the predominant use of illustration rather than photography serves the magazine well in its exploration of potential futures, ideas rather than things.

There’s much to learn from the 30 year old pages. Of particular interest to me have been the pleas by foresighted ecologists proposing basic environmental science improvements that are to this day dealt with as fringe concepts – such as the benefits of passive solar in the ‘Housing Provision’ issue of August 1976 by Gerald Foley. The landscape issue from the following month (cover by Ron Herron) contains a piece by Sutherland Lyall, whose name might be known to fellow bloggers thanks to his column in the Architectural Review on architecture web sites.  Which gives me another opportunity to thank him for his kind words back in November 2005:

I realise now that I’ve completely ignored his advice about using blogs for company websites.

The December 77 cover showing a beautiful Erskine drawing has been uploaded more extensively before, also you may like to contrast and compare these with somewhat more sombre approach taken by the AR during the same decade.

You can see all the covers I’ve uploaded over the last few years in a flickr collection.

“Stunning new look for Birmingham’s New Street station…”

Wait a minute, that looks rather familiar…

Gare de Lyon by Santiago Calatrava

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered.

Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Run, run free…. free run.

Dan Mathieson, Head of Sponsorship at Barclaycard, the title sponsor of the World Freerun Championships said: “Freerunning is an amazing sport and some of the moves executed by the top performers are truly breathtaking. For Barclaycard, the fluidity of movement that is at the very heart of free running has a clear parallel with the freedom that we give our customers through such innovations as contactless payments and travel with the Barclaycard OnePulse card. We’re proud to support the first of what we are sure will become major annual events”

Oh dear.

This month saw the first Freerun World Championships in London and they were sponsored by Barclaycard. There’s little point dwelling on the obvious, soul crushing irony here; it’s just too depressing. Anyway, who am I to begrudge these guys the chance to go legit and pay the rent doing what they love most? Every form of human endeavour becomes a potential franchise in the end, right? Might as well embrace it before your sponsor goes belly up in the coming economic event horizon.

However, there’s no escaping the emptiness of the black boxes and railings in the video above. Surely free running has meaning and sense of purpose defined in part by the reinterpretation of the urban landscape? Or put another way, it looks a lot cooler with a good piece of architecture in the background.

So, come on Barclaycard, how about next year you employ some architects to design the course? Or perhaps rebuild seminal spaces from urban topographies around the world. Take a vote from freerunners everywhere and then construct their favourite places on the other side of the world, allowing the locals to reap the benefits of your global reach without all that tedious mucking about with carbon spewing plane jouneys. See how the London boys take on the spaces of Manhattan, or let the New York team tackle urban Russia. You could even employ Richard O’Brian to present it.

Buy the Birmingham Library and turn it into the world centre for freerunning.

Because let’s face it, enlarged photos of shuttered concrete just doesn’t cut it.

Richard Horden in BD on the development (2 years on) of his micro compact home:

Horden is now working on the family compact home, where kids have their own cube. ‘I’m constantly coming up with variants,’ he says. ‘Next is a low-carbon version. It could be built like a car on a production line, but we don’t have enough orders.’ So how many have been sold? ‘We’ve only built 15 and haven’t sold any… yet. I get emails saying what a wonderful idea. Of course when they see it, it’s much too small for most people.’

Size: 2.6m x 2.6m

Price:

“m-ch units are available to purchase for delivery to geographical Europe at a guide price of EUR 25,000 to EUR 34,000 (subject to contract). This price includes all interior fittings. Subject to site conditions, the price excludes delivery, installation, connection to services, consultant’s fees and taxes.”

Cost per sq m: 3698.22 EUR

photo credit

Grantham Caravans on their Sterling Onyx micro compact home:

We always have an excellent selection of new and used caravans for sale. The comprehensive touring caravan accessory shop is well worth visiting. We display all the latest caravan and leisure equipment and run special offers throughout the year. We are specialists in touring caravan insurance. We also have a coffee shop.

A warm welcome awaits you at Grantham Caravans – we look forward to seeing you.

Size: 5.51m x 2.29m

Price:

EUR 20,232.26 – deliver it yourself, no need to connect to services, no consultant’s fees or taxes.

Cost per sq m: 1603.45 EUR

Tonight’s offering is mostly photos, apologies to all on a dial up connection. As promised in my previous entry, I visited the Fantasy Architecture exhibition at Walsall Art Gallery on Sunday.

We arrived with only hours to spare, Sunday was the last day of the exhibition, if you haven’t been yet you’ve missed it. The tight deadline didn’t worry me as I’d brought the whole family and I knew this would only be a cursory glance at best. Taking your kids to a gallery can be both a burden and a joy, depending on your luck/mood. Our most successful visit yet being a trip to the Tate Modern, during which our son decided he would turn himself into an installation to demonstrate the acoustic qualities of each room – screaming and laughing at everything. The faces of the other visitors was itself a picture that deserved framing.

I managed to get a few moments peace this weekend thanks to a model by the artist Nils Norman entitled Let the Blood of the Property Developers Run Freely in the Streets of Hackney. Josh and Josie were captivated by the detail (on the left).

It was a much more extensive collection than I’d expected since it has sifted through the archive of the RIBA library and produced work from over 150 years of architectural drawing. One of the most striking realisations to come from this diversity was how pathetic many of the contemporary computer generated illustrations looked against the hand crafted work.

Here’s the FAT project I mentioned in the previous entry, against a drawing of the design for the Imperial Monumental Halls and Tower by John Pollard Seddon and Edward Beckitt Lamb.

And I’m not just talking about whether bigger is better. An MVRDV image of their Pig City project suffered from the same problem against a Paulo Soleri sketch of equal dimensions.

The Fourth Grace – the latest dream from Will Alsop to prove itself beyond the imagination of the people who have to fund it – was looking somewhat less than graceful.

A model of Foster’s Twin Towers proposal was also on show. It’s better than Libeskind’s.

Regardless of contents of the exhibition, a trip to Walsall gallery is always a delight. It’s one of the best pieces of contemporary architecture in the Midlands. It’s rigorous, inviting, intriguing, warm, dark where it should be dark and light where it should be light. The coffee is quite good too.

The foyer is a knockout.

It’s a lesson in how to make an entrance to a public building.

I’ve trained my daughter to do a little jig whenever she’s within 20 metres of good architecture.

It passes the test with flying colours. Go see for yourself.