the journal of an architect
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
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
Books
eversion posted a photo:
sketch book thoughts on the micro compact urban home - why reinvent the wheel?
eversion posted a photo:
Watching a streaming presentation in SL with Martin from isite From Eversion Orman via http://blogHUD.com