no2self.net

A quick note to point out that the brief for this year’s Euroclad competition has been launched.

Last year was Brighton, this year your site visit will take you to the moon.

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

From comments I’ve had in the past I think a fair number of readers and passers-by here at no2self are either students currently at schools of architecture or people considering joining a course. Driving home this evening it struck me that today’s events gave a pretty good representation of what it’s like to practice. So if you’re considering a career in architecture I offer the following as a taste of things to come.

07:30 - Leave house.

08:30 - Meeting with Police Architectural Liaison Officer to discuss crime prevention performance of my scheme. Agree to re-think some parking and highway, think about Oscar Newman’s ‘Defensible Space’.

09:00 - Meet site manager and guy with digger. Find missing manhole under abandoned kayak. Acknowledge hill, think about retaining wall tanking detail.

09:30 - Stand around in rain with structural engineer, stare down a hole provided by aforementioned guy/digger combo, rub earth between fingers, think about geology.

11:00 - Arrive at office. Phone client and explain latest development regarding confusion over legal boundary of site, who ground is to be conveyed to and what the landscape design will need to accommodate. Talk about procurement. Think about thermal mass.

12:00 - Explore timber cladding detailing. Talk about cedar, larch, Thermowood, Accoya, oak. Think about UV and rain weathering.

13:00 - Lunch with fellow architect. Debate current state of our profession. Agree that suburbia is being attacked by modernists who think the word ‘vernacular’ is a pejorative term. Think about staying in bar.

14:00 - Back to office. Draw a house. Think about today’s IT problems.

15:00 - Get telephone call announcing we’ve won bid to design environmentally friendly refurbishment of Victorian terraces in Stoke on Trent. Think about blog entry to announce it.

16:00 - E-mail environmental design consultants to discuss timetable for collaboration on detailed design of passive solar spaces we recently won funding for. Think about 3 year post occupancy research.

17:00 - Visit home of resident group chairman to discuss anecdotal survey design and local resident training to monitor success of aforementioned solar spaces. Think about the fact that he’s known me since before my children were born.

18:00 - Visit home of resident objecting to my planning application. Apologise for things I could have done better, discuss complicated commercial realities, demolition techniques and future market value of property. Find a solution. Promise client you can solve it by the end of the week. Think about going home.

21:00 - Go home.

I’ve seen the future and it’s expensive. Not to mention cold, sterile and utterly charmless.

I look forward to seeing more of this development when it appears on the next series of Lost as the home of the as yet undiscovered and even more sinister community: The Other Others.

Speaking about the project, Richard Rogers said: ‘Our partnership with George Wimpey has given us an opportunity to take a fresh look at housing design.

‘By working closely together, we have been able to develop an approach which links construction closely to design, giving real value to the homeowner.

‘The scheme at Oxley Woods is highly flexible and sustainable and will, we hope, provide homes for a diverse community for many generations to come.’

Early guides put the market value of the houses at £199,995 for a two-bedroom property and £249,995 for a three-bedroom home.

From ajplus (my emphasis)

*Update*:

As usual, input from older, wiser colleagues at the office this morning forces us to ask the question: Has housing progressed in almost a century?

(image source)

from Weissenhofsiedlung built in the late 1920’s - more images on flickr

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.

A break from the standard blogging currency of comment, criticism, conjecture and pointing elsewhere … here’s a series of entries about one of my own projects and how it’s been confirming my growing concern about my generation’s appreciation (or rather, lack thereof) of the history of housing design:

Part 1: to a degree

In November last year I was asked by a client to develop a housing layout for a small site on the edge of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. The brief, set by Black Country Housing Association, called for an ‘exemplar’ environmentally friendly scheme. A layout had already been prepared by others using three pairs of semi-detached properties but large storm and foul drains had subsequently been found to be running through the centre of the site and they required a substantial ‘wayleave’ (zone to be kept free of building) on either side. Very little room for development was remaining.

Can you continue the ‘green’ agenda of the initial scheme? Could we still achieve the same number of units on half the site? Can we have a plan by next week? Can you note that the brief asks for ‘award winning architecture’?

Yes, yes, yes and - depending on your definition of award, winning, or for that matter, architecture - yes:

We have a tried and tested technique in our office. It’s a simple thing but it’s value is often overlooked by those obsessed with the black/white, and/or, left/right, x/y world of the perpendicular. It’s called, for want of a more poetic name, 45 degree planning. It’s come to my rescue often. So often in fact that it risks becoming a style rather than a technique, but for the moment I shall stand by the assertion that I’m understanding the action rather than just reaching for a result. It’s a simple thing but instead of its more popular sibling - 90 degrees - it seems to require a certain deftness. It feels more like a vector. A point on a line of infinite possibilities, rather than a line between two points of known characteristics (*cough* thank you D & G *cough*).

Three existing conditions leapt off the site plan in that first meeting to create the response above: the position of the neighbouring house to the north, the narrow space forced on us by the drainage restrictions and the north-south orientation of the site. The last one creating the need for an appreciation of the solar gain to be equally enjoyed by each property to both front and back, and the potential heat loss to be avoided in the north.

A blustery weekend in a coastal cottage with pencil, paper and Jane Eyre on the TV and it developed into this:

The crucial factor in the development beyond that initial site plan proved to be the roof. You can see me noodling about with it on the first 3 sheets (noodling - verb: to apply, through subtle, successive iterations, the full extent of one’s many years of architecture experience to a design problem). The result is a type of scissor roof arrangement in which each plot has two different pitches, one half of which connects to the following plot as the houses step back. We get visual continuity and interest out of the wider street scene, irrespective of level changes, that also creates an opportunity/need to deal with the intersection detail directly above the centre of the floor plan. Ventilation possibilities? Check. Natural light inlet? Check. Character? Innovation? Place making? Check, check and (hello CABE) check.

Returning to the office that week I discussed the layout and house design with older, wiser colleagues. Go and take a look at the work of Eric Lyons, they said. Eric who? said I, not knowing his work. The following week brought the announcement that the RIBA would be mounting an exhibition of his work at Portland Place. The coincidence seemed too great to ignore. I booked train tickets.

Coming up: Part 2 - The RIBA and their terrible muffins

Rod, knowing I’ve finally started reading Thousand Plateaus, flicks his del.icio.us wrist and points me towards the sweetest spot of the latest BLDGBLOG interview with Mark Wigley. It’s too good not to repeat at length here:

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.

Not sure I trust the usage comparison results over at twitterment.com twitterment.umbc.edu. These are clearly flawed.

Although if the page tracking stats on the word architecture came with an RSS I might be prepared to overlook the problem.

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Vodpod	22 March 2007 23:20
I thought you might like this collection of videos, called a ‘Pod’.Come have a look. You can join the Pod, watch the videos I’ve collected, and tell people what you think and what you liked.Or build your own collection with your own Pod, with videos you make yourself, or videos from dozens of sites like YouTube, Google Video, and more. architecture Cameron Sinclair’s TEDPrize acceptance speech: “Design like you give a damn” Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles MacGabhann Architects FKL Architects Please click the link below to view the collection: architecture.vodpod.com