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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.)

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.

I have to admit that I might not have been entirely clear in my previous post about Venn diagrams, rifts and Egon Spengler. Behind all the mucking about with sci-fi analogies, it’s simply an attempt to use a drawing language that makes me think about aspects of projects and problems that may usually be overlooked.

During the last few days I’ve spotted a couple of other examples that might provide similar inspiration. Firstly, DfL’s Green Grid proposals for London examining the green infrastructure between 6 areas of the city; described in Kieran Long’s AJ editorial like this:

You probably will have noticed that the AJ has been tackling urbanism in a serious way in recent weeks … But time and again while researching these features we have come across the same problem - no-one has a drawing that can adequately sum up a strategic approach to a place. For this alone DfL should be congratulated.

source: Architects’ Journal 13.12.07

Secondly, whilst hiding - during a post office party hangover - between the pages of a Calvino book, I found my favourite author citing dialect instead of drawing as a tool for fixing these liminal spaces:

Lexical richness (as well as richness in expressiveness) is (or rather, was) one of the great strengths of dialects. Dialects have the edge on the standard language when they contain words for which the standard language has no equivalent. But this lasts only as long as certain (agricultural, artisan, culinary, domestic) techniques last - techniques whose terminology was created or deposited in the dialect rather than in the standard language, Nowadays, in lexical terms, dialects are like tributary states towards the standard language: all they do is give dialectal endings to words that start off in technical language. And even outside the terminology of trades, the rarer words become obsolete and are lost.

I remember that the old folk of San Remo knew dialects that represented a lexical wealth that was irreplaceable. For instance: chintagna, which means both the empty space that remains behind a house that has been built (as always in Liguria) up against terraced land, and also the empty space between the bed and the wall. I do not think an equivalent word exists in Italian; but nowadays the word does not exist even in dialect; who has heard of it or uses it now? Lexical impoverishment or homogenization is the first sign of a language’s death.

source: Hermit in Paris - Italo Calvino

I found this gang of hellraisers staring back at me from the pages of a book in the dentist’s waiting room this week, looking like they’d just stepped out of some liminal rock ‘N’ roll space. When assembled in this fashion they were fittingly called The N’Betweens.

For extra festive season points, who can tell me the name of the band they would eventually become?

Clue: IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!

Update: Slade! Although for the life of me I can’t work out which one is Noddy Holder.

Our man in Australia, Dan Hill from City Of Sound, sends his latest dispatch by video over at InterestingSouth2007, pitching an idea for sustainability points scoring encouraged by neighbourhood social networking competition. Bruce Sterling meets Robert Venturi - toaster spimes shout via roof top neon signs.

Home owners collate their energy use, export the stats to their neighbourhood’s Facebook group and then float the results out over the street with a hovering, illuminated super-graphic. You can imagine a community where street lights have been replaced with glowing balloons of green pride or red shame.

Dan’s request for input makes me recall the notes I took at last year’s Ecobuild conference:

Enter Carrera and his ‘City Knowledge’ project, which aims to ‘…transform municipalities from hunter-gatherers into farmers…’, farming information about it’s energy uses throughout all it’s processes to build a constantly up to date database. Described in three moves, this takes you from,

plan demanded data,

which is costly to turn into

plan ready information,

when it would have been better to have

plan demanding knowledge.

Because at this point you get the reverse and the knowledge begins to demand a plan, creating new, unforeseen possibilities.

This was part of a presentation by Fabio Carrera about the work he was developing with Adrian Hewitt (of Merton Rule fame), following his PhD exploring the concept of City Knowledge:

City Knowledge leverages the dominant plan-demanded mode of data acquisition to gradually and inexpensively accumulate high-return data and to ensure sustainable, low-cost updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper knowledge of our cities.

Carrera and Hewitt have begun to collate environmental data and combine it with GIS mapping. Following Carrera’s ‘middle-out’ model, this emanates from the municipal departments, rather than bottom-up people power or top-down government departments. Described in his 2004 dissertation thus (in a section seductively topped with references to both Lynch and Calvino):

With the advent of the web, a culture of interconnectedness and a certain familiarity with the concept of sharing through a distributed network of independent computers have created the right mindset upon which the City Knowledge concept of “middle-out” can now be grafted. Middle-out entails that each department will first and foremost take care of its needs, so that the primary functions that the department or office performs will be invariably performed with or without the connection to the outside world.

The City Lab department of WPI has been developing this middle out data farming in a number of fields, including the Local On-line Urban Information System (LOUIS).

It seems to me that LOUIS needs help to get out of the lab and into your living room. In Dan’s model, the middle-out municipal department is the aggregation of a community through web 2 social networking. The people become their own Ministry of Environmental Truth, with an attractive AJAX interface, freely accessible API for iPhone toaster control apps and a folksonomic tagging system for all the white goods.

These two approaches should get together for a meetup. Tom Carden should be invited. Carrera seems to have dabbled with web 2 ideas, but the trail disappears after a single blog entry and solitary del.icio.us bookmark - perhaps he’s moved onto web 3.

Final proof that these were two paths destined to cross eventually: Carrera’s City Lab has its own City Sounds project

Elsewhere, Matt Webb - characteristically ahead of the game - announces his sustainability score to the neighbourhood by burning tyres on the roof.

Some work on a lecture I recently gave about Secured by Design (more on that coming up) produced a spin-off diagram worth sharing. Unashamedly following the Indexed model (what’s the formal name for this diagram type?), it pitches three elements of urban design (accommodation, people, transport) against each other and marks intersections, inputs and outputs.

What I’m interested in here is the way this type of diagram turns boundaries or edges - lines - into space to inhabit, both intellectually and physically. Territory that is usually microscopically small, like the surface tension between liquid and its container - such as the boundaries that bump into each other between a path alongside a garden, or a pavement alongside a road - is ripped open, forming a space (A, B and C) that must be negotiated and moved through, rather than stepped over.

I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.

At the end of all this, when I’m cross-hatching the bits in the middle, I’m defining that qualitative quantity ever-present in urban design discussion: density.

Update: Let’s be more explicit with our hyperlinks: the foggy link is an overlap with some recent posts by Adam Greenfield commenting and expanding on the work of Steven Flusty - see this post also: Foggy, further to Flusty’s five.

Also, I realise now that this was merely a continuation of my previous posts, Vacant Space and Theory about practice.

I’ve made some disparaging comments about Daniel Libeskind in the past, but their critical value was admittedly low as I’d never visited one of his projects in person. A recent trip to Manchester gave me the opportunity to put that right by visiting the Imperial War museum.

So here’s the thing; no matter what you feel about the heavy handed symbolism or the worrying repetition of familiar forms in disparate projects, there’s no escaping the fact that the guy can make spaces that, technically speaking, get you right in the gut. An architecture of the stomach, or heart if you prefer a more romantic reference, that seems all the more impressive coming from an architect who spent so much of his career working with an architecture of the mind.

Although one has to admit that it’s impossible to distinguish the impact of the excellent exhibition contents from the impact of the architecture (which some would argue is the final measure of success), the fact remains that the Imperial War Museum is an immensely moving building.

Sat in the cafe having lunch, attempting to play devil’s advocate to my new found admiration, I was struck by the idea that the counter argument might be that disjunction, disharmony and formal conflict is easy. That clumsy, clashing, calamitous volumes and surfaces are no more difficult to create than throwing a teapot from a window*. This is hardly a building of firmness, commodity or delight, so is it the sign of someone getting away with getting it wrong? So what does it take to ensure you make the wrong moves at the right time? The answer, I realised, can be found in the work of Les Dawson.

A British comedian of the 70s and early 80s, one of Les Dawson’s comedy routines involved him playing the piano very badly. Except that behind the bum notes it was widely understood that he was in fact a very talented pianist. It was exactly that talent that meant he could play the piano badly with just the right comedic timing. He had to know how to get it right before he could so successfully get it wrong.

Daniel Libeskind is the Les Dawson of architecture.

Should further proof be required I offer the following two quotes; the first is from wikipedia (with only a minor, but crucial adjustment from me):

He loved to undercut his own fondness for high culture. For example, he was a talented pianist but developed a gag where he would begin to play a familiar piece such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. After he had established the identity of the piece being performed, Libeskind would introduce hideously wrong notes without appearing to realise that he had done so, meanwhile smiling unctuously and apparently relishing the accuracy and soul of his own performance.

The second - a Dawson gag - demonstrates the parallel between Dawson’s propensity for crashing the high brow into the low brow and Libeskind’s journey from ‘paper architect’ to builder:

In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought…I must put a roof on this lavatory.

Perhaps even, this last conflict is the very definition of architecture itself; valiantly riding the ambered chariot across the sky while waving a ball cock over your head. Libeskind is clearly onto something, I shall invoke the spirit of Les Dawson in all my future work.

* pieces of a broken teapot were used to create the form of the four three shards of the Imperial War Museum building envelope.

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing a number of projects with a strong green agenda and I’m excited about the opportunity to get some comments and input from visitors.

Unfortunately, to my bitter disappointment, we weren’t included in this year’s paper catalogue. After a few moments of cursing and wondering whether to call it off for fear of lack of advertising I gathered my thoughts and realised I had a secret weapon: You.

Please, help me spread the word and flex my Google muscles a little. Pass it on, tell your friends, link me up - I’ve put an entry on the office web site with more details, please drop it into whatever blogging, bookmarking, digging, tumbling tools you have at your command:

Architecture Week Open Practice Day

Better yet, come and see me next week, I’d love to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Failing that, I have a shiny new digital whiteboard to play with and if you’re lucky I’ll get some biscuits in.

Continuing in the yearly tradition, I’ve picked out a few items (after the jump) from the Architecture Week events list for the West Midlands. Work your way through as many as you can and then come and tell me about them when you visit next Friday! Last year’s podcasts and Google Earth route is still available to help you find your way to the office.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

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.