tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37952088257426357132024-03-14T16:04:00.091+00:00fantastic journalCharles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.comBlogger380125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-67998739658743805742023-11-03T22:12:00.001+00:002023-11-03T22:13:58.511+00:00Jonathan <p><span style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">In the summer of 1996 I was living in Berlin, emerging from a long winter in every sense. Planning my return to London and studying for my diploma at the Bartlett school of architecture, I picked up a catalogue describing the various teaching studios on offer. The text for Studio 12 was brief, pithy and to the point. It was written in words that were clear like water but also slippery like ice. There was no flannel, no long digressions into chaos theory or bird migration patterns or the importance of the fold or whatever else was fashionable at the time. But neither were the words reductive or simplistic. They were simple but playful, clear-eyed but canny, the world of architecture deconstructed momentarily so new ideas and thoughts could emerge. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">The words were written by Jonathan Hill and when I arrived at the Bartlett that Autumn I joined his studio. It was a funny year. I wasn’t an especially good student….things got in the way, friendships got formed and relationships started and a little too much fun was had. I sensed Jonathan’s frustration but he remained - as he always was - a generous, tireless, thoughtful critic. His method was often tangential and oblique: he teased out ideas, probed alternatives and made elliptical, somewhat enigmatic statements. He wore his learning lightly and he never used cliches. Unlike a lot of sharp critics he really loved architecture, often surprising and unlikely kinds of architecture. His taste and views were always his own, never normative but somehow gently provocative.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">Studio 12 was well on the way to becoming a legendary teaching unit at that point but it was still early days. Within the Bartlett it offered a sanctuary from the insectoid architecture that predominated, the complex welded contraptions and whimsical creatures that emerged from the workshops. Unit 12 was a space for another kind of enquiry and invention, it nursed an interest in the user and the occupation of architecture, the political circumstances in which buildings happened and the conventions of practice versus the avant-garde. Later it embraced interests in historical inflection, the baroque, the decorative and the outer reaches of post modernism…but it always did so with that enquiring, quizzical spirit that was so much a part of Jonathan’s character.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">Jonathan wrote beautifully and his books pushed into fascinating areas….like that course brochure, he had a way of being both clear and richly alert to complexity. He never narrowed things down or looked for easy answers….the joy was in the search and the openness to invention, though always guided by a desire to avoid the obvious and the cliched.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">After the Bartlett I would see Jonathan at events and talks and sometimes at social events. He was a friend of sorts, not a close one but someone I always enjoyed seeing. He invited me to crits and when I came to the school to give a lecture, he provided a warm and generous introduction. Jonathan was a fixture in a way, a one-man institution. if anyone summed up the best things about the Bartlett it was Jonathan, who brought an unashamed intellectualism and a subtly anarchic spirit to offset the bombast. He inspired a lot of people and influenced a multitude of practices and careers. He seemed to love the Bartlett and to enjoy his unique status within it.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">The news of his death this week then came as a profound shock. He was somehow ageless and ever present. Unchanging and entirely himself. His preternatural youthfulness was part of his charm, a sense that whilst everything moved on and disappointments and achievements came and went, Jonathan was always Jonathan, fresh faced despite the years, dressed the same, and always interested, intrigued, up for a drink. He liked gossip and he kept up with a lot of people. Unlike an awful lot of tutors it felt that he really liked his students. </span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">He has left behind an impressive body of work, some great writing and several generations of graduates whose work and approach to architecture was profoundly and positively affected by his guidance. Thats his professional legacy. I know little of his private one though I am sure he was hugely loved and valued. He was a gentle soul with a sharp mind whose deceptively simple words revealed great depths of thinking. He was also a lovely guy.</span></p><p class="p2" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; min-height: 28.4px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;"></span><br /></p><p class="p3" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; font-size: 22.9px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span class="s2" style="font-family: UICTFontTextStyleBody; font-size: 22.92px;">Jonathan Hill RIP</span></p>Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-5960221345409256422013-12-18T22:27:00.000+00:002013-12-18T23:21:37.743+00:00Fat. End of.<div style="text-align: justify;">
So, <a href="http://www.fashionarchitecturetaste.com/2013/12/fat_announces_the_end_of_its_p.html">we've </a><a href="http://www.bdonline.co.uk/news/fat-ends-its-practice/5065144.article">announced</a> our end and, surprisingly, hearteningly and for all the right reasons, it feels good. Architectural practices don't normally just stop, but then FAT have never been a normal architectural practice. That's been both a blessing and a curse of course. We've never made it easy for ourselves. </div>
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As Charles Jencks understatedly put it in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/dec/17/fat-architecture-break-up">Guardian's FAT 'obit',</a> we "went against the tide" of British architecture. Setting up your stall in direct confrontation to the tasteful, earnest, wet-liberal mainstream was never going to make us popular. Gleefully saying how much we hated it just alienated us more. Broadsides against everyone from Terence Conran to Ken Shuttleworth to Ricky Burdett were never the moves made by smart careerists. We've even been rude about some of our current clients for god's sake. </div>
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All of which made us popular with critics, students and allies similarly baffled by the timidity of much architectural culture and the sanctimonious clap-trap that goes along with it. Few of these people employ you of course, or at least not to design buildings. Throwing brick bats from behind a curious and misleading acronym made us a tricky kettle of fish when it came to clients and the accursed need to pay the rent. Some of the people who <i>did</i> employ us have shown remarkable forbearance, others an undoubted courage in taking us on. But I like to think we've re-payed them every time with nothing less than total conviction and commitment to the cause as well as some - <i>come on</i> admit it - quite good buildings.</div>
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So what were we on about? Well, initially it stemmed from dissatisfaction, maybe even an anger about the limits of architectural culture, its disinterest in the world around it and indeed in anything other than its own internal discourse. We wanted to make architecture swim in the same fast waters as other forms of (popular) culture, to have the immediacy of pop music, the currency of cinema and the savvy of contemporary art. We wanted it to be sad and funny, smart and stoopid, popular and arcane. We wanted the exquisite melancholy of sweet nostalgia and the giddy joy of the absolutely brand spanking new all at the same time. We wanted it to embrace the immediacy and absurdity of fashion and celebrate the fleeting ephemerality of taste </div>
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We also thought architecture could be about things other than buildings, about events and actions, spaces and people. Politics even. So we did art exhibitions that moved around on plastic bags and proposed urban plans that didn't involve building anything much at all. We entered a competition for regenerating an industrial area of Birmingham that took the form of a short story and some cartoons because we thought the place was largely ok as it was. We came second. Years later the client wrote to us to tell us that we should have won.</div>
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We railed against all those hoary old modernist myths that clung on to British architecture like tedious barnacles: truth to materials, honest structures, form following function, la-dee-bloody-da. So we designed an advertising agency office that took inauthenticity to new lows. A gold-leaf covered beach hut on legs which served as an AV room, an elongated work space based on the wooden forts of Russia and a library on wheels. In a church. And all knocked-up by a Dutch TV set builder for about a fiver and treated to look older than it actually was. There's no NBS clause for any of that, and I've looked. </div>
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Our early heroes were perhaps predictable enough: Koolhaas and Tschumi for sure, a bit of Peter Wilson, a heavy dose of Archigram and some of Cedric Price's attitude. Later though other far less fashionable influences came in. Venturi Scott Brown of course (by way of Dan Graham, another influence and a great writer on architecture), Charles Moore and - ye gads! - briefly even Michael Graves. Partly through VSBA we also discovered a love of classicism, mannerism and the baroque, Michelangelo, Borromini, Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor. Soane too, especially his exquisite and sublime house in Lincoln's Inn Fields. But we also liked the sweeping, scenographic showmanship of Nash, not mention the sly wit of Lutyens and the vigorous fuck you-ness of Stirling, who of course only got better when he went PoMo.</div>
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Much of this came about through an enforced disengagement with contemporary architecture, a kind of deliberate exile. Looking back, Jencks is right. We were ploughing a very odd and lonely furrow then, copy and pasting scratchy drawings of old churches and wooden huts and listening to Deep Purple in a messy studio at the top of an office block in Golden Lane. Eventually someone burgled us and stole Sam's Deep Purple album as well as my My Bloody Valentine ep's, although oddly they left the Rizzoli monograph on Stanley Tigerman.</div>
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Around this time, Sean designed his own house which distilled a lot of what was going on in our heads. South Park meets Adolf Loos we described it as, a surprisingly sculptural, spatially complex interior that looked like Le Corbusier had done some DIY on a London terrace house. On the outside it was clad in fake wood and painted baby blue and, predictably, a lot of people disliked it. A lot of people didn't and it undoubtedly moved us on a long way.</div>
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Then fate came to smile on us in the form of Nick Johnson of Urban Splash, Matthew Harrison of Great Places and a group of Mancunians who evidently took pity on a southern wine drinking jessie (me) and a scouser (Sean). On the way up to the interview for a job designing 23 new houses our lap top bust. So we turned up with no slides and no presentation - no pictures of our work at all in fact - and we won the job. There's a lesson there though we for one never heeded it. </div>
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But we got to design the houses which were something of an odyssey into the heart of the English popular home. Just before we did that we curated a solo exhibition at Manchester's CUBE gallery (props to Graeme Russel, an early and tireless supporter) called - somewhat ludicrously - Kill The Modernist Within. Later, when someone looked at the houses in Islington Square, they declared that we hadn't actually killed the modernists, we'd just got them to do the planning. </div>
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There were other don't-try-this-at-home marketing ploys. Our truly insane first website for one, with its pixellated pornography, bizarre self-deprecatory biographies and downloadable clip'n'fold grave stones, for which Sam bears by far the lion's share of responsibility. There was also the 'Konran Store' at the VandA, where we sold hand-made and genuinely hideous pottery replicas of design classics such as Aldo Rossi's coffee pot and the first IMac. Stephen Bayley's wife bought one of the former and I like to think of it ruining the otherwise impeccably tasteful interior of their house to this day.</div>
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Around the time of Islington Square, Crimson arrived in our lives and commissioned us to design some kind of decorated industrial shed for people to get drunk in next to a petrochemical plant on the edge of Rotterdam. A dream commission for us. It was love at first site and a marriage made in heaven, or at least in a mutual love of new towns, post-punk pop and doing the wrong thing. </div>
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Bigger projects came - some great ones like the BBC - but also the inevitable weariness of all those PPQ's, interviews for jobs that don't happen and competition wins that lead nowhere. We might have started to moan a bit at times. But we grew an office and some wonderful people came to work for us. We even had staff reviews and there was a CPD session once, although Sean stopped it half way through because it was too boring and no one was listening to him anymore. </div>
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And right towards the end we got commissioned to do two of the most wonderful projects ever: a house in the wilds of the county I was born in, designed with a cross-dressing, mega-famous potter with an even-bigger love of decoration than us, and the British Pavilion in Venice with our thoroughly likely old friends Crimson and our throughly unlikely new friend Owen Hatherley. Both projects will finish next year and, together mine two of the strongest themes in our work: a critical re-engagement with Modernism and what it means today, and an embracing of narrative, decoration and symbolic meaning in architecture. So, not bad ones to go out on. </div>
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But it definitely feels like time for a change. 20 odd years is a long time to work with yourself let alone anybody else. And collaboration can be a job in itself even before you start the other stuff. As Sean said, it's one end and three beginnings and it really feels like a new start in the best possible sense. Like much of what came about, I can't recommend it as a career strategy, but more architecture practices should consider retiring. It's very therapeutic and people even say nice things about you. Then again this might not be such a rarity for everyone else. </div>
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The BTL snarks have given us a lot of joy of course. The person on Dezeen who said, simply"Please stop this shit" will live on in our memories. As Bob Venturi said elsewhere, you have to admire invective of that clarity. It hasn't all been about annoying people though. Actually none of it has. We've done what we've done for the love of it, because we genuinely enjoyed stuff and thought you might too. For the record, we weren't pranksters and we weren't taking the piss. We were as serious as you like, as all the best jokes are at heart. </div>
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What comes next is enormously exciting though too. A change is as good as a rest as my grandmother never said. And architecture, we have long maintained, is about change however much we architects try to resist it. So, there'll be more news soon from me. In the meantime there's lots of people to thank who aren't at FAT now but once were...too many for here but I for one am profoundly grateful to FAT's founding fathers for giving me the leg up - I was a johnny come lately to the party and they did the hard bit - and fellow travellers and early co-authors (hello Tom and Cordula and Geoff and Sarah and others) who sometimes get written out the script and to all the fabulous people who worked for and with us as well as the clients who gave us the chance to build. That last bit is important. And mostly of course I should thank Sean and Sam for a thrilling, inspiring and exhilarating nearly twenty years. They're quite smart, those two.</div>
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So, ta ta for now. But, watch this space. </div>
Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-89335734821934953482013-11-07T21:52:00.002+00:002013-11-08T10:50:48.717+00:00Hommage a Lina Bo Bardi<div style="text-align: justify;">
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So today we took a trip to the wealthy suburb of <span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">Morumbi, once a rainforest outside Sau Paulo and now home to seemingly endless roads of gated mansions patrolled by security guards. Tinted windowed 4x4's and taxi cabs drive up and down its hilly streets while the only people on the pavement seem to be domestic staff trudging to work. And the occasional prostitute, doing the same I guess.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">Somewhere in these hills hovers Lina Bo Badi's </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">Casa de Vidro, the remarkabl house the Italian-born architect designed for her and her husband and their seven cats in the early 1950s. You approach it up a steep and winding driveway which makes a 90 degree turn at the end to bring you up to, or more accurately, <i>under</i> the house. The living room floats amongst the trees above you, perched on some fabulously skinny columns and sandwiched between two thin slabs of white concrete.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The drive carries on under this structure where a stair takes you up to a lobby that is both inside and outside the house. You haven't actually gone through a door but this slot like space is coded as interior by the placement of an abstract painting hanging on the wall in front of you. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGByZnYJEF1Vo3zut9ml36JvBYzjM6a5JnuQUFVgBX4oKKJBZbXKnaB4PqQHcoFLLlNsG7c5cUW9nPz1p1bFNwMr2jvRvDxS139OUwY30Uo0WnWYocbA04f6RcdP7UlDhmEpcxxQa6FFg/s1600/IMG_3621.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGByZnYJEF1Vo3zut9ml36JvBYzjM6a5JnuQUFVgBX4oKKJBZbXKnaB4PqQHcoFLLlNsG7c5cUW9nPz1p1bFNwMr2jvRvDxS139OUwY30Uo0WnWYocbA04f6RcdP7UlDhmEpcxxQa6FFg/s1600/IMG_3621.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCvzywJu5Kx9Tn8qt4rfkLz1-vNVwbYSjdht9rq1Auv_5BoAnK4yej8nZWZ8nZV58X1KAM7XTxSGI7kzIvcsxMpA_IikXT2pA0vrdpJini1DHukS5AhyphenhyphentU4uGFWd9N_LhaYKZg27N9c1I/s1600/IMG_3617.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCvzywJu5Kx9Tn8qt4rfkLz1-vNVwbYSjdht9rq1Auv_5BoAnK4yej8nZWZ8nZV58X1KAM7XTxSGI7kzIvcsxMpA_IikXT2pA0vrdpJini1DHukS5AhyphenhyphentU4uGFWd9N_LhaYKZg27N9c1I/s1600/IMG_3617.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">Y</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">ou enter from below basically, like a tree house, and emerge into the large, glazed living space with its random and very beautiful collection of furniture, paintings and artefacts. You can walk up to the skinny black frames of the floor to ceiling glass walls and get an intense, vertiginous rush as you gaze out through the trees at the vast city beyond.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM-sEzALRFBsNF-cv4xTWcvzOqgXiWjHa9rgzzoZ0aaDbPAu6cXc4JtyNqMuIB_J4iwzNgf0J6EpEJ8_gW91VCyEsPew9qBp0RLTdmJZexYeZ_mIVdt5lUi9pyJwR1AJ8ZRV2SZzbVgTY/s1600/IMG_3593.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM-sEzALRFBsNF-cv4xTWcvzOqgXiWjHa9rgzzoZ0aaDbPAu6cXc4JtyNqMuIB_J4iwzNgf0J6EpEJ8_gW91VCyEsPew9qBp0RLTdmJZexYeZ_mIVdt5lUi9pyJwR1AJ8ZRV2SZzbVgTY/s1600/IMG_3593.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">In the middle of the space is a hole, a kind of vertical courtyard through which a tree grows and which allows glimpses of the corridor to the bedrooms behind. </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The bedrooms and bathrooms sit at the back of the house, small and dimly lit in comparison to the expansive and spatially undefined living room. But they have a care and meticulousness about their arrangement and detailing. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMqc-WZYZ9s1NM4WvdhlIYkSRZi_fPDoIQWpK0feZTbqEiFgHa5-3rP5pBs2wZWYeN167ZzbIVpDMpWk6jHSfqrTRRaaEda19ku7q_H7mk0rENQKEbxje1YM-ukBO3mrifAWIOATXM2Y/s1600/IMG_3595.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuMqc-WZYZ9s1NM4WvdhlIYkSRZi_fPDoIQWpK0feZTbqEiFgHa5-3rP5pBs2wZWYeN167ZzbIVpDMpWk6jHSfqrTRRaaEda19ku7q_H7mk0rENQKEbxje1YM-ukBO3mrifAWIOATXM2Y/s1600/IMG_3595.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.200000762939453px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The door handles for instance are beautiful and surreal, reminiscent - as one of my companions Damon Rich pointed out - of a pair of bulls horns when you can see both sides of the door. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Nyb25P6SENTW42g0rhbdaWtao83RROaO3NJrx_ac45ovdo9CXVU7WDmFLVD-JAjgPXSn1qxpmEfryrQAdHRdx8DVAwkIGMV2gIoN9FlXQ9eiMu6veWOLhYkNpcj9QyVSju7U9fXo19o/s1600/IMG_3598.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="background-color: white; clear: left; float: left; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13.200000762939453px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3Nyb25P6SENTW42g0rhbdaWtao83RROaO3NJrx_ac45ovdo9CXVU7WDmFLVD-JAjgPXSn1qxpmEfryrQAdHRdx8DVAwkIGMV2gIoN9FlXQ9eiMu6veWOLhYkNpcj9QyVSju7U9fXo19o/s1600/IMG_3598.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUpGZVjAwD3EL3CheGMiefjx2_g1uN7R8bT-Kez874KEWq_nW2uPafuxsF4MSuPggT38VRUu0kSMuIJbfFtwLepXk7CN19n8P6CnTluJUZP2-HI3VfV7mh4NjhVa8ra9XcjRoV702Tv_E/s1600/IMG_3602.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUpGZVjAwD3EL3CheGMiefjx2_g1uN7R8bT-Kez874KEWq_nW2uPafuxsF4MSuPggT38VRUu0kSMuIJbfFtwLepXk7CN19n8P6CnTluJUZP2-HI3VfV7mh4NjhVa8ra9XcjRoV702Tv_E/s1600/IMG_3602.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">The two wings of the house - the glazed, floating front and the more traditional, ground hugging back - are linked by a vast kitchen of impressive modernity for its time. The Bo Bardis it seems, liked to host parties and it's hard to imagine a more spectacular and glamorous setting for them. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY3EIk9qpM99GYXxv_OWHsbn85My6femJOeluQEAEDOCJq5dgaluq-L5whmnAzga27j7VIwAzS9Yp72VEDQHbydnZStZRp6bw8XE8gQtes6K_5rFj_BCtoNClQG7ScZFKBPNqnX9_0vgk/s1600/IMG_3606.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY3EIk9qpM99GYXxv_OWHsbn85My6femJOeluQEAEDOCJq5dgaluq-L5whmnAzga27j7VIwAzS9Yp72VEDQHbydnZStZRp6bw8XE8gQtes6K_5rFj_BCtoNClQG7ScZFKBPNqnX9_0vgk/s1600/IMG_3606.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">Brazilian modernism of the 50's and 60's aspired to a level of spatial fluidity and gravity defying structure that makes European brutalism seem pretty tame by comparisonb. Flying canopies, vertiginous ramps, tilted floor planes and highly ambiguous definitions of inside and outside, make them thrillingly disorientating experiences. Bo Bardi's house takes the domestic entrance sequence and turns it into a spiralling and disjunctive vertical journey. The stairs are outside, the hallway is in an undercroft and there is a tree growing in the living room. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px;">As you leave, the house seems to just float away above you, hanging in the trees.</span></div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-5718974951444066012013-10-31T22:56:00.000+00:002013-10-31T23:13:09.516+00:00London Buses and São Paulo BiennalesTypical. You wait several months for a post and then two come along at the same time. Well, ok, so you probably weren't exactly waiting, but......<br />
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....below you'll find a couple of long-in-the-making posts for all the usual tawdry reasons. The first is a review, some twenty years after its release, of Mike Leigh's Naked. I first watched this film in Berlin in 1993, when Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Twenty years later I watched it in the Barbican where Mike Leigh was present for a post-screening q&a. Interestingly, as far as I can remember, the questions were very similar the first time, revolving around the issues of the film's perceived mysogyny.<br />
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Whilst acknowledging this as a very valid observation, I have also tried to talk about the film in a different way. Not because it isn't important but because there are other, equally powerful and troubling aspects to it. Anyway, the review is below......<br />
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The second post is a very belated follow-on to my City of London guide, this time looking at two buildings on the London Wall, one by Norman Foster and the other by Richard Rogers. Without wishing to look like some kind of stalking obsessive, Rogers is also the subject of a recent review for Icon, which you can find <a href="http://www.iconeye.com/news/reviews-2013/review-richard-rogers-ra-inside-out">here</a>.<br />
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Lastly, a note that I will be talking at the <a href="http://www.crimsonweb.org/spip.php?article154">Track Changes</a> event at the <a href="http://www.biennialfoundation.org/biennials/sao-paolo-biennialv/">2013 <span style="color: black; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 16px;">Bienal de São Paulo</span></a> organised by Crimson. The event is on the 4th, 5th and 6th of November and I will be speaking as part of the discussion "What's Your Crisis" on the 6th.<br />
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Anyway, if anybody who reads this or knows about FAT is there, come along and say hi.Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-39019365057511092732013-10-31T22:40:00.001+00:002013-10-31T22:40:19.038+00:00Team 2<div style="text-align: justify;">
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At the western end of London Wall, facing each other across a small and rather nebulous public space are two new-ish office buildings, one designed by Richard Rogers and the other by his old Team 4 partner Norman Foster. More correctly, the buildings were designed by the firms of Rogers, Stirk, Harbour and Foster and Partners.</div>
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Accreditation is important not just because both men run large architectural practices made up of numerous collaborators, but also because the buildings are from the more recent, 'late' stages of their respective careers. They could thus be regarded less as the outpourings of singular artistic vision and more as the products of well-oiled architectural machines. Given their proximity to each other though, it's interesting to relate them to key projects of each architect's 'youth', inevitably inviting questions as to who has hung onto youthful ideals the longest.<br />
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The RSH building contains numerous references to previous Rogers designs including - most obviously - the technicolour funnels of the Pompidou Centre. But there is also the bright yellow painted steel of the house he designed in Wimbledon for his parents and the meticulous techno detailing of the Lloyd's Building. And then there's that slightly uncanny way Rogers has with glass, the way that the panels seem to just float dreamily across the surface of the building, mainly in order to show off the Meccano-like structure more clearly.</div>
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With its billowy fully glazed curves, Foster's One London Wall echoes his Willis Faber Dumas office building of 1975, especially at night when the lights inside seem to dematerialise the architecture entirely. This building is also instructive of the difficulties faced by hi-tech architects away from green-field sites and industrial estates. The compromises of tight urban sites, the odd angles and awkward adjacencies and the fact that up close nothing is actually straight or perpendicular, creates slightly ungainly monsters of buildings based on unrelenting grids and repetitive bay systems.<br />
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Fosters answer to this at London Wall - and far more successfully at Ipswich - is to cloak his rational floor plates with a free-floating curtain wall that follows the curve of the street. Both buildings thus envelop their sites, becoming both figure and ground at the same time. The old articulations of architecture - back/front, facade/interior, fenestration/wall - disappear and the buildings become almost abstract, as scaleless, and undifferentiated as a computer screen.<br />
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Unlike Willis, Faber and Dumas though there is no soft, egalitarian programme to go with this aesthetic at London Wall, no rooftop garden to playfully augment the non-hierarchical acres of lime green-carpeted burolandschaft. Instead there is just high quality, top-dollar city office space.<br />
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There are other departures too. Ponderous details of establishment conservatism have crept-in via the reconstituted stone panels that wrap the ground level, and the attempts at traditional massing at the corner junction. This particular corner looks onto the roundabout containing Powell and Moya's Museum of London, the spectacularly horrible 200 Aldersgate Stree (now minus its Stirling-esque cascading glass atrium) and Bastion House, one of the last Miesian towers left from the 1960's masterplan*. One London Wall adds little positive to this interesting but fairly disastrous urban scenario. </div>
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It does though manage to connect more literally to the radical ideas of the 1960s and 70s in the form of the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01944369308975898#.Uf4tgLvLgZc">high-level walkways</a> planned and partially built by the Corporation of London. There are public entrances at either end of One London Wall that lead up by escalator and lift to bridges connecting to the Museum of London and the Barbican estate beyond. Although it connects to them it's worth noting that the One London Wall also terminates these connections too. Coming from the Barbican end you are returned unceremoniously to ground level, the thrills of three dimensional urbanism officially over.<br />
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RSH's 88 Wood Street offers yet more in the way of Grade A office space. But without its stylistic twitches it would be a wholly unremarkable addition to the city. These mannerisms suggest that while Rogers developed an architectural style, Foster defined an entire design economy. One London Wall is both singularly unremarkable <i>and</i> the product of a vision all the more powerful for its seeming anonymity. While Rogers has retained his liberal politics and boho leanings, Foster appears aloof from such concerns. And while Rogers has developed a key role in advising governments and politicians on policy, Foster has aligned himself with the powers beyond our democratic institutions.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* London Wall, and its rebuilding over the last thirty to forty years will have to be the subject of another post. </span></div>
Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-23843654227386569122013-09-25T18:33:00.001+00:002013-11-01T13:57:20.590+00:00End of the millennium psychosis blues<div style="text-align: justify;"><i>"What are you guarding in this particular post modernist gas chamber?"</i></div>
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<i>"Space".</i></div>
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<i style="text-align: justify;">"How would you know if somebody stole it?"</i><br>
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The most obvious thing to say about Mike Leigh's Naked - recently screened as part of the Barbican's Urban Wandering season - is that it is a violent film and that much of the violence is directed towards women. Its themes of misogyny and women as the much-abused objects of male frustration, makes it tough going, especially as the violence is sometimes played, if not exactly for laughs, then certainly with an eye for dark farce. Naked flips disorientatingly from black humour to something approaching slapstick and back again, meaning that you are never quite sure where the encounters it depicts are heading. It is as if Leigh, determined to make a diffident kind of film, keeps snapping back to his more usual fare.<br>
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Naked's inclusion in a season of films about London suggests though that it can be read as an exploration of the city as much as human relationships. London is portrayed here with an almost apocalyptic, end-of-the-millennium bleakness. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's almost impossible to watch any film made in London over the last thirty years without it in some way offering a commentary - however inadvertent - on the city's gentrification, but Naked's choice of locations makes it particularly revealing in this respect.</div>
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It begins with a violent sexual encounter in a Manchester backstreet from which Johnny - the film's anti-hero - escapes in a stolen car. In a brilliant opening sequence, he drives to London through the night along an almost deserted motorway before dumping the car by the side of the road somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Somehow he finds his way to his ex-girlfriend's flat in Dalston*. For the next few days he careers around London, taking in Soho streets, West End offices and a particularly dystopian scene below what looks like a motorway flyover.<br>
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I had assumed this latter scene was filmed below the Westway but at the Q+A that followed the film's screening, Mike Leigh revealed it, not without irony, to be Shoreditch. Appropriately enough, these days the same spot comes complete with a pair of decommissioned, graffiti covered tube trains hoisted up on to a warehouse roof and used as studios for hipster design companies</div>
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The use of buildings and settings is actually superbly handled throughout. The Dalston flat manages to be both absolutely unremarkable and highly theatrical. The curving flight of stairs up to its elevated front door adds a spatial drama to the frequent comings and goings, as well as the seemingly final departure of Johnny. And the interior, with its weak sunlight creeping in behind curtains, manages to be neither comically scummy nor particularly wholesome. Its ordinary, vaguely but not too obviously unappealing, like any number of flats you might have passed through in your time.</div>
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There are two exceptional urban scenes in the film though. The first is filmed in Soho where the camera sits closely cropped on an Italian delicatessen window late at night. There is a general sense of chaotic activity so it takes a while to realise that our attention is being directed to one person in particular. Or rather two, because Johnny, slumped in a doorway is watching the same guy as us, a frantic, aggressive young man marching up and down the road shouting for a missing girl. The familiar desperation of a place like Soho with its fleeting, potentially electric, encounters is captured brilliantly. </div>
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Later on Johnny finds himself in the doorway of an office block, this time being observed by the building's security guard. The guard lets him in, allowing the rather brilliant exchange at the top of this post to take place. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The two wander the corridors of the empty building, following the monotonous regime of the security guard and exchanging equally tortured theories on life, the universe and everything. As in real life, Johnny's deep cynicism and nihilistic theorising steamroller all over the security guard's vague, hopeful humanism.</div>
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A word too about Johnny, who remains one of the best, most compelling film characters ever created. The film is really nothing without him and the other characters don't come close to his complexity and disturbing charisma. This is one of the faults for the film's detractors of course, the fact that Johnny's relenetlessly bullying monologues are never challenged. He rampages through the lives of those around him, smashing away at their already fragile self-esteem and freaking them out with his elaborate, baroque conspiracy theories. </div>
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He is strangely, eerily familiar, like someone you might have genuinely met once in a bar. He's both fascinating and terrifying company, forever waiting for the next person on whom to inflict his frustrations and formidable intelligence in order to undermine whatever weak resolve they may have formed that life is basically worth living.</div>
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There are undoubtedly some poorly drawn characters in the film too. The Porsche-driving, sadistic yuppie Sebastian seems comically absurd now, with his endless, sneeringly ludicrous references to sex. "Have you ever eaten smoked salmon after making love?" he asks at one point, as this was both the height of decadence and erotic transgression. And Clare Skinner's stuttering, neurotic control freak of a nurse is rather silly too, putting a speedy end to the madness that has engulfed her flat while she has been away in sit-com style.<br>
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* For location geeks, this is at the junction of Shacklewell Lane and Downs Park Road</div>
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<br>Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-45991542153817397452013-09-05T19:36:00.000+00:002013-09-06T06:41:33.690+00:00Bulletin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaOD9OZKE5jVz88fNSROv-culdd4BBoAKutqcoDol9prm5gh6QBeSmy1hIm9q2U7vnWNmCaFNhAoRyGCsp7ZQ99FVRkKBdeCnm541OTMJ_HAQ6OCyNqyITeevoUOoLpx2kKpjAuXD5DQk/s1600/cropped+perspective.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">I<img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaOD9OZKE5jVz88fNSROv-culdd4BBoAKutqcoDol9prm5gh6QBeSmy1hIm9q2U7vnWNmCaFNhAoRyGCsp7ZQ99FVRkKBdeCnm541OTMJ_HAQ6OCyNqyITeevoUOoLpx2kKpjAuXD5DQk/s1600/cropped+perspective.jpg" height="110" width="400"></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Image: Neo-Plotlands village, by Jason Le Mare)</span></div>
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As this old blog has shown renewed signs of life lately, I feel justified in writing one of those look-what-I've-been-up-to posts, especially as there's a fair few things to mention.</div>
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Most notably I have contributed an essay to the RIBA's Building Future's series on the <a href="http://www.buildingfutures.org.uk/think/theme/8/21">future of the village</a>. In it I speculate on what a 21st century version of the planned and utopian villages of previous centuries might look like and what kind of economy it might be based on. My essay also serves as an introduction to the diploma studio I ran last year. The work of students in the unit is featured in a <a href="http://www.buildingfutures.org.uk/think/theme/8/24">separate photo-essay. </a></div>
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There are also excellent and provocative essays by Daisy Froud, Matt Wood and Iain Watt.</div>
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I've also contributed an essay to the latest issue (no. 3) of the wonderful <a href="http://www.blockmagazine.co.uk/Issue_no_3.html">Block magazine</a>, edited by Rob Wilson. I originally wrote this piece on the subject of architecture and money a couple of years ago now and it's only just seen the light of day which explains the fact that all the statistics in it are from 2011. Nonetheless, it's no less relevant I hope and the rest of the issue is, as usual, beautifully produced and well worth reading.</div>
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Incidentally, Rob interviews me about the house that FAT have designed with Grayson Perry - currently on site - for his other publishing venture, the on-line <a href="http://www.uncubemagazine.com/blog/9080991">Uncube magazine</a>. You can read Grayson's thoughts and inspirations about the project <a href="http://www.cntraveller.com/recommended/culture/contemporary-british-architecture-holiday-houses/artist-grayson-perry-fat-architects-a-house-for-essex-wrabness-uk">here</a>.</div>
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Last but not least in this vulgar round of trumpet blowing, there's a review of a fabulous collation of architectural models on film from last month's issue of <a href="http://www.iconeye.com/news/reviews-2013/review-mock-ups-in-close-up">Icon</a> available on-line. In next month's issue I'll be reviewing the RA's Richard Rogers retrospective and on here I'll be relating my attempt to find and photograph the lovely steel framed house and studio he designed in the Essex countryside early in his career.</div>
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For anyone who isn't sated enough by all that, I'll be speaking out loud and in public at Frome's newly minted <a href="http://www.rooklanearts.org.uk/events/architecture-club-presents-charles-holland/">Architecture Club</a> (motto: the first rule of architecture club: talk about architecture club) on October 1st. </div>
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And finally, following my previous post about Matzine's Jargon debate, there is a no-doubt highly embarrassing film of the whole event available to view <a href="http://matzine.org/2013/09/04/jargon-debate-online/">here</a>.</div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-86847728410908607802013-08-24T07:40:00.001+00:002013-08-24T07:40:36.830+00:00The 15 Step Anti-Jargon Programme<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>The other day I took part in a very enjoyable debate on the subject of jargon organised by the lovely people at <a href="http://matzine.org/">Matzine</a>. Along with <a href="https://twitter.com/crystalbennes">Dr Crystal Bennes</a>, I was on the anti side of the To Jargon Or Not To Jargon divide. We lost, mostly due to the formidable debating skills of our opponents <a href="https://twitter.com/daisyfroud">@daisyfroud</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/indy_johar">@indyjohar</a>. Despite this, I thought I'd post up what I read out on the night.......</i></div>
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<b>15
Steps To A 100% Jargon Free Life<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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Getting off jargon isn't easy, but carrying this list with you at all times can really help. It's a handy list of words that you should avoid if at all possible. Try eliminating them from normal conversation first and if you feel confident extend the ban to professional situations such as crits and presentations. </div>
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Remember: these are 'gateway words' that can easily lead to you becoming addicted to meaningless verbiage. It includes words that I use myself. I describe
myself as a recovering jargon abuser. But with the help of this list I'm slowly getting better........<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>1. Space</b>. As in; <i>“This is a really contemporary space”.</i>
Translation: I quite like this room.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>2. Map/Mapping</b>. As in; <i>“I’ve been mapping this contemporary space”</i>. Translation: I’ve drawn a plan of the room.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>3. Programme.</b> Especially when pre-fixed by ‘cross’ as in; <i>“I’m really into cross-programmed space. This vertical trout farm
on Mars* is still a bit boring. Maybe it needs an experimental theatre attached
to it".</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>4. Interrogate.</b> As in; <i>“I think you really need to interrogate
this building in section”</i>. Translation: I can’t think of anything else to say
in this crit.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>5. Problematise</b>. As in; <i>“This upside-down staircase really
problematises the concept of vertical circulation".</i></div>
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<b>6. Challenge.</b> As in; <i>"This upside-down staircase really
challenges preconceived notions of up and down". </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>7. Calibrate.</b> As in; <i>“The threshold is carefully calibrated
to express a sense of transition from public to private spaces”</i>. Translation:
This is the front door.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>8. Boundary:</b> As in; <i>“The junction dissolves the boundary
between inside and out”</i>. Translation: It’s glass.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>9. Blur:</b> As in; <i>“Their work blurs the disciplinary
boundaries between art and architecture”</i>. Oh hang on, I think that’s one of
mine.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>10. Disciplinary:</b> See above.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>11. Practice:</b> As in; <i>“Writing is my form of spatial practice”</i>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>12. Praxis:</b> See above, but far worse.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>13. Theorise</b>: Example; <i>“Sorry I’m late, I’ve been busy
theorising my praxis”</i>. Translation: I’ve been reading my twitter stream.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>14. Liminal: </b>As in; <i>“My spatial praxis is very concerned
with mapping liminal spaces”. Translation: I live next to an industrial
estate”</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>15. Territory/Territorialise/De-territorialise</b>: As in; <i>“This is my attempt at de-teretorialising
the ideological function of jargon through challenging preconceived notions of
language with respect to spatial and theoretical praxis”.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/i/connect"><span style="font-size: x-small;">* Props to Alastair Parvin</span></a></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-44345331606739184432013-08-20T07:55:00.001+00:002013-08-20T10:42:15.997+00:00Holiday Reading<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDhWQLVeJnYnqio3wJJFaSDRXoiQZDiXijL-Vu6-sHWr2GZzGrEh0kGVrSkdOONX-_cwlt1pnOrUNIvfIWARay4av8dp6boq6y9yFrfdbBK8oFOFY2um5Ltziemi_k8Z-scldiHB0dmMs/s1600/IMG_1571.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDhWQLVeJnYnqio3wJJFaSDRXoiQZDiXijL-Vu6-sHWr2GZzGrEh0kGVrSkdOONX-_cwlt1pnOrUNIvfIWARay4av8dp6boq6y9yFrfdbBK8oFOFY2um5Ltziemi_k8Z-scldiHB0dmMs/s1600/IMG_1571.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a><br />
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<i>"You are from Kent?" she said, 'maybe you can answer me this. Why are old things so important in England?'*</i><br />
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My wife laughed when the book arrived. It seemed almost <i>too</i> right for me, as if someone had suddenly perfected one of those Amazon consumer profiles to an eerie, unnerving degree. There was that title for a start, the Elliot misquote that could be a description of a certain kind of blogospheric writing with its hyper-links, digital jump cuts and chance virtual encounters. </div>
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More fundamentally there's the subject matter. Connecting Something With Nothing is an anthology of writing about the south east coast, a place we have spent the last five or six years exploring. A flick through the essays within it reveals familiar place names and obsessions: Pegwell Bay, New Romney and the Wantsum Channel, long-since silted up harbours, nuclear reactors, muddy estuaries and rusting neon signs. My kind of holiday destinations basically, the sort of places I drag my family to on bitingly cold new year mornings or rainy bank holiday weekends.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd4CbpSuIl3o40foWwTx6nfhQPI3apUOpF1FSQmnBu9Ghdq3xlIQRSc2Vdgo4WJd28ruzEkflRfLkDfZpqp3AXD3YS73fdk_v0c9cjxkw5rXdvLLv1wlKAn_qGU7aDCTMF-FBm_eoPHKg/s1600/IMG_1638.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd4CbpSuIl3o40foWwTx6nfhQPI3apUOpF1FSQmnBu9Ghdq3xlIQRSc2Vdgo4WJd28ruzEkflRfLkDfZpqp3AXD3YS73fdk_v0c9cjxkw5rXdvLLv1wlKAn_qGU7aDCTMF-FBm_eoPHKg/s1600/IMG_1638.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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The contributors list offered up some familiar names too, names recalled from Twitter encounters and even in a couple of cases, Actual Real Life. All of which is to say that I was quite heavily predisposed to like this book, almost to the point where it could only disappoint, like an over anticipated night out.</div>
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Fortunately such perverse worries turned to nought. There are some great things in Connecting Nothing With Something. Kit Caless' lyrical evocation of ordinary pleasures in un-lyical places is genuinely moving. I liked Salena Godon's bracing poems about teenage love affairs and filthy fishermen too, as well as her suitably salty tale of teenage mayhem in 80s Hastings. Rowena McDonald recalls a more awkward adolescent experience in the Sussex town of Newhaven.</div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Adrian Self's contribution is both enigmatic and funny, a kind of miniaturised version of W G Sebald if he'd had a sense of humour. It takes the form of notes from an imagined audio-art project, a parodic psychogeographic derive that is more of an eventful walk around the block.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Owen Booth's short story is highly entertaining and faintly peculiar, a fictionalised account of a young Richard Burton's antics while filming Green Grow The Rushes in New Romney in the early 50s. I enjoyed this tale of illicit drinking, smuggling and sex so much I sought out the film on YouTube, which is considerably more enjoyable to watch if you've read Owen's short story first I imagine.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">There is a similar tone to much of the writing here; memories of adolescent lives in burnt-out seaside towns that are still fresh. The voice is generally sophisticated, sceptical and aloof but also prone to nostalgia and an unspecific sense of loss. Many of the pieces suggest a rapprochement with places almost forgotten about over the last few years, places now indelibly linked with (recently lost) youth.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">The Margate contributions coalesce around the role of teenage sub-cultures - skin-heads, punks, mods and rockers alongside its cheerier, cheesier reputation for cockney knees-ups and Chas'n'Dave. Iain Aitch - curator of Margate's Hidden Youth Culture History - contributes a good, short essay on Margate's recent half-hearted attempts regeneration while Gary Budden describes a personal revelation at the Turner Contemporary exhibition Nothing In the World But Youth.</span><br />
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Art and regeneration loom large too in these accounts, especially in the two gloomy but still grand towns that bookend the collection. Margate and Hastings are like mirror images of each other with their mysterious pier fires, shiny new contemporary art galleries and histories of drinking, drugging and escape.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">The book and its contributors are more than aware of the contradictions, the dubious nature of the role of art in a regeneration industry seemingly fuelled by middle-class property speculation and cup-cakes. And yet, undeniably both towns have acquired two fine new public buildings after years of mostly shonky and careless development, buildings that draw day trippers and 'staycationers' in the best seaside tradition.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">These conflicts have become intertwined so that it is now virtually impossible to separate artists and writers drawn to forgotten or overlooked places from the boosterist language of the regen. agencies that are themselves now confined to (New Labour) history. Iain </span>Sinclair after all has a flat in Marine Court, Hastings' extraordinary cruise-liner like art deco block of flats. Psychogeography has become inseparable from the inevitable clean-up campaign that follows in its wake, property speculation on the back of obscure interests and arcane modernist fictions.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4byL064xCfV9pgHw5_Z0pByEv4wudYZFt2L96iCzB7xgIVRTxxwrgTPLibk3rUna8zOSL-IqgeZyuOdXczpqujMeZryepYLXAp3cvm82BIILoVsxQ2N0T3TRjTf1jfbZQWUXkDkdcUI/s1600/IMG_1064.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK4byL064xCfV9pgHw5_Z0pByEv4wudYZFt2L96iCzB7xgIVRTxxwrgTPLibk3rUna8zOSL-IqgeZyuOdXczpqujMeZryepYLXAp3cvm82BIILoVsxQ2N0T3TRjTf1jfbZQWUXkDkdcUI/s1600/IMG_1064.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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I should say at this point that I'm a part of the problem. A DFL (Down From Londoner) if ever there was one. My wife and I bought a house in Deal a few years ago. Spending time there is partly about escape and partly about a nostalgia of our own. My father spent his childhood in Deal and my wife was brought up by the sea, so for both of us it connects back to something for sure.<br />
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The seaside represents a place where the usual rules don't apply, a holiday from normal life. But the <i>British</i> seaside is indelibly and unavoidably about the past. The stories in Connecting Nothing With Something situate themselves in this illusory and highly ambiguous space. For people born there - and most of the writers in this anthology were - the coast is somewhere to escape <i>from</i> rather than to, small towns with big social problems and only one direction out. Or two if you are feeling particularly bleak. But then, as the stories also make clear, such places drag us back too, exerting a powerfully nostalgic pull. Like boats borne back ceaselessly against the tide, as someone once said.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-4dlG7pxnuUjzWgQ2Ti4uMysmRPE-W2mNrwc08ymEvsxSBiMvuwMmsTX2ArJY5ubQd4rzlmSEK99AVI6yvEaIjsH9a9KmPetabdkPv6Tag-x3fOXvEE3B5DCvqyXm9AZpFpo8aOR2b1M/s1600/IMG_2993.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-4dlG7pxnuUjzWgQ2Ti4uMysmRPE-W2mNrwc08ymEvsxSBiMvuwMmsTX2ArJY5ubQd4rzlmSEK99AVI6yvEaIjsH9a9KmPetabdkPv6Tag-x3fOXvEE3B5DCvqyXm9AZpFpo8aOR2b1M/s1600/IMG_2993.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a><br />
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* Taken from <i>Old but Somehow New</i>, by Kit Caless.<br />
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<i>Connecting Nothing With Something: A Coastal Anthology is available from Influx Press<a href="http://www.influxpress.com/connecting-nothing-with-something/#.UhMdP7vLgZc"> here</a>.</i></div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-3756227406843058302013-08-05T17:19:00.000+00:002013-08-05T22:52:18.049+00:00Slim Slow Slider<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>Well, this quick-fire blog post thing didn't work too well. And the Richard Rogers post will have to wait until after I have visited the RA exhibition, which, incidentally, I will be reviewing for Icon. So here's another short post instead on the architecture of the Square Mile....</i></div>
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This is a bit of an oddity really, but well worth checking out if you are in this particular neck of the woods*. St Mary at Hill not only has a pleasingly strange street name but is home to a very peculiar collection of buildings. Three in particular stand out because of the way in which they interact and integrate with each other. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiIxJcglx0RvQ9WFcd61u3w08Lj5q5L_8DJfVaVb-n3DRyEWvFzjd4jIj2V-VUXi3RV-PeOgcm1dJtYBOnfClVFNGnXqqFhLK9lg4Upeq5TDj5zMhWqqUkg2jktQn52XflyU8jefTt53o/s1600/IMG_3128.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiIxJcglx0RvQ9WFcd61u3w08Lj5q5L_8DJfVaVb-n3DRyEWvFzjd4jIj2V-VUXi3RV-PeOgcm1dJtYBOnfClVFNGnXqqFhLK9lg4Upeq5TDj5zMhWqqUkg2jktQn52XflyU8jefTt53o/s1600/IMG_3128.JPG" height="240" width="320"></a></div>
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The short, shallow hill is dominated by St Mary at Hill itself (herself?), an originally medieval church rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire. Its official address is Lovat Lane, but the real frontage - if you could call it that - is on St Mary at Hill. The facade is deeply strange, featuring a blocked-up Venetian window, a broken pediment and a very large, hand painted sign bearing the churches name. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjur2BIeG2_wdkyFj8muz1wg90o2K05xKTVO1cYp_TKv0sVTMythzadAenRRKJZRewRRWZ_SWterAZCvNd12aKm_ncK8lxRgvBVEMYFy0qt2WIOHOgnO-wBXw67h8plN4Hpgsh_1m28HoY/s1600/IMG_3143.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjur2BIeG2_wdkyFj8muz1wg90o2K05xKTVO1cYp_TKv0sVTMythzadAenRRKJZRewRRWZ_SWterAZCvNd12aKm_ncK8lxRgvBVEMYFy0qt2WIOHOgnO-wBXw67h8plN4Hpgsh_1m28HoY/s1600/IMG_3143.jpg" height="320" width="240"></a></div>
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Odder still is the entrance which is through an unsung opening in a very mannered, late-Victorian structure off to one side. This building has a completely asymmetrically grouped array of windows which can be only partially explained by the fact that it abuts the church and effectively hides the courtyard behind.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sECasRXtSYgX88Fmgg81dAMdC79SQInnQWiX4juCCwh3ul1f6BNmSS1FPIHx-STaRUUrmkVaKpavJUQS8N3C564Bpj6E9pDVYizllYUKL_az_-gimuPbXU5UxDZGY0MJREQIQNq2sEg/s1600/IMG_3145.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7sECasRXtSYgX88Fmgg81dAMdC79SQInnQWiX4juCCwh3ul1f6BNmSS1FPIHx-STaRUUrmkVaKpavJUQS8N3C564Bpj6E9pDVYizllYUKL_az_-gimuPbXU5UxDZGY0MJREQIQNq2sEg/s1600/IMG_3145.jpg" height="320" width="240"></a></div>
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The archway leads to this courtyard and the entrance to the church itself, which features a collection of circular openings of diminishing scales. This intersects with the main entrance from Lovat Lane and the cleverness of Wren's arrangement - which effectively buries the church amongst its neighbours - becomes clear.</div>
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To the left of the church is another opening marked appealingly enough by a small, slightly sinister skull and cross bones hovering in its pedimented doorway. This leads to a stepped passageway that appears to lead off to Lovat Lane but which was gated on the day I visited. </div>
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The cream stucco of the church frontage spreads across this adjacent building as if to claim a bit of it for itself, with the result that the spaces behind the facades of these seemingly discrete buildings slide into each other ambiguously. No great shakes perhaps, but there's some, y'know, complexity and contradiction going on here for the mannerist geeks amongst us. </div>
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Inside, there is a rather beautiful and not very mannered at all Wren interior. </div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-8183687956670379332013-06-17T09:57:00.000+00:002013-06-17T17:37:55.884+00:00What's this?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">When I've been thinking about it all, my ambitions for this blog of late have revolved around an ambitious photo essay about the city of London, a kind of off-the-cuff, shoot-from-the-hip, don't-bother-doing-any-research Pevsner meets Nairn rip-off. The fact that Pevsner has already met Nairn in the form of their jointly authored guides to Surrey and Sussex (of which more, hopefully, later*), is but one barrier to this enterprise. Another is having, y'know, a job and a family and all that. So the project has limped along as a vague ambition and a growing collection of iphone snapshots for some time now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In order to make something happen and to help get back to an idea of blogging that is enjoyable, incidental and relatively low-maintenance, I've decided to just post photos of buildings that I pass in the City more or less one-by-one in the hope that it might all add up to something more substantial. A week-by-week, cut-out and keep photo-essay by default**.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Why the City? Well, partly because I have recently moved there and therefore spend a lot of my weekends wandering its enjoyably deserted streets and squares. And partly, because as a friend observed to me the other day, the City is what architecture <i>does</i>. Architecture is ultimately the expression of institutionalised power (whether public, private, benign or despotic) and there are few institutions as powerful historically as the City of London. No wonder then that it is home to so many extraordinary buildings by so many famous architects; Wren, Hawksmoor, Soane, Lutyens, Berlage, Stirling, Rogers, Foster and Koolhaas as well as <i>almost</i> home to Mies van der Rohe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Alongside these there are many oddities, one-offs and eccentricities as well as numerous lumps of unremarkable corporate power, some of which are going up as I speak. The City, unbearable in so many ways, is a very pleasant place at the weekends especially on summer days when its deep streets and alley ways provide shade and its little parks and church yards are nearly empty. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As a consequence of recent wanderings, I've been reading various architectural guides to the City's architecture, not just Pevsner and Nairn, but Christopher Woodward and Ed Jones and one or two others as well. So, in an informal way the posts will hopefully comment on previous comments by more illustrious commentators whilst allowing me to be more partial, biased and badly informed than any of them. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">I'll start with <i>this</i> strange collection and the building at the centre of it all. </span>McMorran<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> and </span>Whiby's<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> Wood Street Police Station sits surrounded by a jostle of taller later buildings by Richard Rogers, Terry Farrell and Eric Parry and one much earlier one, the tower of St Alban's by Christopher Wren.</span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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McMorran<span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> and Whitby were architects so out of step with their time that their buildings only started to make any kind of sense several decades after they were finished. </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Wood Street Police Station, built in the mid-1960's - and featured in The Jokers, one of that decades classic caper movies starring Oliver Reed and Michael Crawford - was described by the architects' biographer </span><a href="http://www.londonsocietyjournal.org.uk/459/denison.php" style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Edward Dennison</a><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"> as "a</span><span style="background-color: #f7f7f7; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; line-height: 14.949999809265137px;">n Italian palazzo in the heart of London serving the needs of a nuclear age". And it is fair to say it <i>is</i> pretty peculiar. It employs a stripped-down classicism but with exaggerated rustication and all manner of mannerist twists in the form of blank windows, sculptureless niches and giant, mysterious chimneys. It has a miniature stone high-rise at the top and a deep basement containing a nuclear fall-out shelter at the bottom. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 14.940000534057617px;">As naive as it is to equate classicism with fascism, Wood Street has an unmistakeable whiff of<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR,_Rome"> Mussolini's EUR</a> about it. Like the work of Aldo Rossi, the deep shadows of its openings seem to deny occupation, as if the building is a hollowed-out shell. The blank muteness of the facade gives it the air of a mausoleum. Or more appropriately, a place of incarceration, which it in fact is, albeit temporarily. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif; line-height: 14.940000534057617px;">Perhaps this is what Nairn meant when he correctly described it as "creepy".</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f7f7f7; line-height: 14.949999809265137px;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Woodward and Jones are predictably sympathetic to its mid-20th century attempt at classicism, but also sniffy about the lack of 'proper' stone detailing. It's sooty moustache-like stains around the parapet and windows are - like the nearby Barbican's - part of its appeal for me, Someone should write something about how British buildings are <i>meant</i> to be stained and musty, But much of the rhetoric around the correctness of classicism is that it suits the climate of this county better than (Mediterranean inspired) modernism. So a mid-twentieth century neo-classical building that wilfully omits coping stones and projecting lintels manages to offend all parties.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f7f7f7; line-height: 14.949999809265137px;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Whatever, it's a fabulous building; strange, compelling and deeply ambiguous. Its present state, marooned by high-rises and hanging off the edge of London Wall, only increases its more peculiar characteristics which is also perhaps unfair. As in their other buildings, particularly their very decent <a href="http://edenison.zenfolio.com/p526036898/h1a6dc85c#h1a6dc85c">council housing in Holloway</a>, McMorran and Whiby attempted a humane, robust updating of classical elements for a very different era and construction industry. It is only other people who found this intrinsically unnerving. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 14.940000534057617px;">Talking of which, just opposite the police station and is if keeping an eye on it is a little bright red sentry post of a service duct by Richard Rogers, part of his London Wall building. It is a diminutive and vaguely comic throwback to his Pompidou days, a self-conscious homage to his younger self. More about that to come........</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxAVXxUlABhubQ33D5KttKRDYGU_jGe3BzUoox0p-Ev5Kfey-nhUojYLEcwEOiJPMXZFO3G1KKWTe8VsckNEIkG0sQQBkjj1q6dYZGf_oilf-idpORSXusAB2dJaj5X2lHmrBAUdTSp2s/s1600/IMG_2406.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxAVXxUlABhubQ33D5KttKRDYGU_jGe3BzUoox0p-Ev5Kfey-nhUojYLEcwEOiJPMXZFO3G1KKWTe8VsckNEIkG0sQQBkjj1q6dYZGf_oilf-idpORSXusAB2dJaj5X2lHmrBAUdTSp2s/s1600/IMG_2406.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Having read these lately with the zeal of the recent convert, I am now officially a huge fan of Nairn. A post on the odd pairing of him and Pevsner is therefore highly likely.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Speaking of which, an old photo-essay of mine on the architecture of Tayler and Green will shortly be appearing in Volume magazine, along with others by pioneers of the format Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy. </span><br />
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-62517534917052037722013-04-25T12:26:00.004+00:002013-04-27T16:47:24.690+00:00Houses for artists<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVu0Ue_MgSyDaWjrToczmngV1wRUjG-W5KEwxtV4LseTHp-ZKUSjzREb8ykP4VG-eh31C3OZJPqJT2WwHeYR_SjFuPgZh7mdc6JKFDAzkCccNCMYkrL8bWNjZU_DW5_txr0lZyJbkZV6U/s1600/2013-03-23+12.34.58.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVu0Ue_MgSyDaWjrToczmngV1wRUjG-W5KEwxtV4LseTHp-ZKUSjzREb8ykP4VG-eh31C3OZJPqJT2WwHeYR_SjFuPgZh7mdc6JKFDAzkCccNCMYkrL8bWNjZU_DW5_txr0lZyJbkZV6U/s320/2013-03-23+12.34.58.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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So <a href="http://www.dk-cm.com/">we</a> finally set out for west London and a short tour of the buildings of Charles Voysey. Voysey is most famous of course for his long, low houses in the country built for the newly wealthy Victorian and Edwardian bourgpoise. Houses such as <a href="http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/are-we-posh-no-were-artsncrafts.html">Broadleys </a>on Lake Windermere and The Homestead in <a href="http://fantasticjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2011_12_14_archive.html">Frinton-On-Sea</a>, which I've written about before.<br />
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The personal style of Voysey's houses - white rough render, slate roofs and green painted woodwork - became ubiquitous and defined to an extent the popular ideal of housing in the early decades of the twentieth century. The buildings we were off to see though are unusual in Voysey's oeuvre. Only one - 14 South Parade in Bedford Park - is a conventional house and even then it is small, urban and compositionally at odds with most of his buildings. The other two - a factory for Sandersons and a purpose-built artists studio - also represented unusual commissions for an architect who became somewhat unfairly typecast.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcbrWBMP-9U0QK_m-AM9S-xo_0s39MZ_zia-dLmt1VP1Waxi7PnKUPpa2o0jeEQKtby8_YGVXL-OBdAh457jsGeuPfjSKcmIv2FH5NfuPawOWFPcOWkTBY0GbkrXPgNpi3E7WJi5_AKlM/s1600/2013-03-23+11.58.45.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcbrWBMP-9U0QK_m-AM9S-xo_0s39MZ_zia-dLmt1VP1Waxi7PnKUPpa2o0jeEQKtby8_YGVXL-OBdAh457jsGeuPfjSKcmIv2FH5NfuPawOWFPcOWkTBY0GbkrXPgNpi3E7WJi5_AKlM/s320/2013-03-23+11.58.45.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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We started in Baron's Court, emerging out through its magnificent district line station finished in irridescent green glazed tiles. The stunning quality of this building with its exquisite little pedimented ticket booths stands as a rebuke to contemporary public realm infrastructure. The latter still managed to make its presence felt though through the introduction of a credit card reader parked unceremoniously in the window.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUhccAl6VCUP_H1Mx8RlltPYeMsJPrz7ofL6VCwEOqN0vPmuAH_JyUlNMrKc90r31jnpm6MWU6h4DPLuSSFdBVt1Lsi4PfsSP6yhpeNtYPqwzRng1ssfjQ3q-UpSQR4fCI7OHbgLsRYbY/s1600/IMG_7252.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUhccAl6VCUP_H1Mx8RlltPYeMsJPrz7ofL6VCwEOqN0vPmuAH_JyUlNMrKc90r31jnpm6MWU6h4DPLuSSFdBVt1Lsi4PfsSP6yhpeNtYPqwzRng1ssfjQ3q-UpSQR4fCI7OHbgLsRYbY/s320/IMG_7252.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Once out we nipped around the corner to see these rather lovely Edwardian artist's houses with their vast north facing studio windows. Despite some extravagant art nouveau touches, they are in bad shape and clearly a little unloved. Not surprising really because they face directly onto the six-lane Talgarth Road choc-full of traffic crawling into London from the west. The built-in benches in the porchways where models would once wait for the besmocked painters of genteel nudes now look particularly uninviting. To be fair it was snowing on the day we visited but the belching fumes of the traffic didn't help.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3j_bcznf_5FcyNE-Ll4GEHC-ggnxoM2DGROUtLmupMHnwtPbCZeauTsaOJifY9QT32XS30F1GcPtGNj77wS84CK_GQxD4Oovz0iaTL6AgPmed8Q2F4Sh2m0iOLF7qo4YnAMHTYc0xpK4/s1600/IMG_7257.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3j_bcznf_5FcyNE-Ll4GEHC-ggnxoM2DGROUtLmupMHnwtPbCZeauTsaOJifY9QT32XS30F1GcPtGNj77wS84CK_GQxD4Oovz0iaTL6AgPmed8Q2F4Sh2m0iOLF7qo4YnAMHTYc0xpK4/s320/IMG_7257.jpg" width="240" /></a><br />
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This mannerist number caught our eye too with a chimney seemingly growing out of an elaborate scrolled gable end as if one had been violently compacted into the other. Having attempted the odd elaborate gable in my time, the structural stability of this one worried me the longer I looked at it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiifhXOCChs0xIWyd9Z7-r943VJVULrLop9iiAqe5385xMXBr3nZv3uF641w1_bDc4yjsqvkWChwsefBS0CbwHyhO0xVF1xzVwjqLG0WaufugSNvgtnMgz3fPZbFLasDXwyhUZuf59xqH0/s1600/IMG_7255.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiifhXOCChs0xIWyd9Z7-r943VJVULrLop9iiAqe5385xMXBr3nZv3uF641w1_bDc4yjsqvkWChwsefBS0CbwHyhO0xVF1xzVwjqLG0WaufugSNvgtnMgz3fPZbFLasDXwyhUZuf59xqH0/s320/IMG_7255.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Just around the corner and on the other side of the railway tracks is Voysey's little St. Dunstan Road studo. The back of it can be seen from the local park where the vast north facing windows are clearly articulated, as is the sharp programmatic dividing line between studio and residence. The latter is tiny, squeezed into the front few metres of the building, the austerity of which must have appealed to Voysey's infamously puritan nature; barely room to tap out your clay pipe.....<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDtxpTzaO28RnwmG5O_Io-3knazr-HLgO0DoaznnpWwJolsaK_IJYhvq6ji_fx9QHM0qcCCvkiCI7S1UZFO6P-TUQIvepYIw07fe9aFJmI_NYhJ7rE8QKYtLceFDIV0w5zlvhGE5XyjrM/s1600/IMG_7265.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDtxpTzaO28RnwmG5O_Io-3knazr-HLgO0DoaznnpWwJolsaK_IJYhvq6ji_fx9QHM0qcCCvkiCI7S1UZFO6P-TUQIvepYIw07fe9aFJmI_NYhJ7rE8QKYtLceFDIV0w5zlvhGE5XyjrM/s320/IMG_7265.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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The studio is oddly wedged into its corner site forming a diagonal at 45 degrees to the neighbouring houses on either side. The relationship between the two is gently mediated though by a subtly curving and beautifully detailed low wall with Voysey's delicate ironwork fencing following it around. It also only just about fits into its site, leaving what must be some strange wedges of space around the edge...clearly the artist was no gardener. </div>
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It is now in the hands of a Hungarian Church group who have constructed some peculiarly garish timber gateways at either end of the front facade. My lack of enthusiasm for these DIY additions brought amused accusations of ideological inconsistency from my companions. <br />
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Voysey - like Edwin Lutyens - was often accused of having a rather childish sense of humour when it came to architecture and the timber brackets holding up the front porch are typical of one of his jokes. The profile is presumably that of his client, a trick he repeated with slightly absurd regularity.<br />
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After this we set off to Chiswick and the second bit of Voysey on our itinary, the ex-Sanderson wallpaper factory where we were joined by our Acton native guide <a href="http://www.sammcelhinney.com/">Sam McElhinney</a>. En-route we passed through two Charles Holden designed underground stations, Acton Town and Chiswick Park, the former mainly because we got lost.<br />
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Both of these had an admirable toughness to them, Acton Town being almost brutalist in its straightforward use of materials. It also contained vast amounts of space, all elaborately orchestrated for armies of suburban commuters. None were in evidence on the freezing saturday morning we passed through though, leaving us plenty of room to admire the quarry tile clad walls and austere decoration.<br />
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Voysey built relatively little except for houses so the Sanderson factory is a very different kind of beast than his usual fare. Nevertheless it has his refined sense of proportion and delicacy of line. Its white glazed brick walls end in chimney-like finials linked by an elegantly loping parapet line which gives the building the quality of a giant version of his furniture pieces.</div>
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The leaded light windows have been replaced and the high level bridge connecting it to the existing Sanderson factory has gone (if it was ever built), but Voysey's design is very fine indeed, an object lesson in how to make an urbane and dignified factory on a tight urban site. It's solid rather than stolid and shows that Voysey could handle both urban situations and vertical compositions.<br />
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At this point there was a departure for food, beer and warmth, followed by a quick scoot around a randomly located timber works. I always enjoy these, especially because the buildings tend to be made by the products on sale making for delightfully ad-hoc timber-fests. This one came by way of appointment to the Queen who obviously gets her decking here, some of which had been used to make an elaborate flight of external steps.<br />
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And then on we traipsed on towards Bedford Park, that genteel artists colony largely designed by Norman Shaw in the 1870's. Shaw developed a number of house types which were bastardised in various ways to create diversity from street to street by Jonathan Carr, Bedford Park's opportunist developer. This mucking around with an already ecelctic mix of architectural provenance, leads to all manor of strangeness and some fairly nutty compositions all round.</div>
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Fruitiest of all is probably Shaw's own Tabbards Inn, a huge pub and theatre beside Chiswick Park station. It has a hundred and two things going on, many of them very nice although not possibly together. I'm not one to judge on excess or questionable taste, but Shaw's work lacks the geometry of Lutyens or the complete conviction of Voysey. Instead it offers a heady melange of mannerisms, overscaled oriel windows, riotous gables, chimneys ago-go and every conceivable material. Nairn described him as a bit heartless, which seems harsh. The addition of a 1960's covered entry stair seems almost of a piece with what else of going on and that in itself is an achievement of sorts.<br />
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The weather was unrelentingly grim by this point and Bedford Park is rich and interesting enough to warrant another visit and another blog post so I will concentrate here on Voysey's single, remarkable contribution. This sits on South Parade overlooking a large green space and the district line trains that hurtle past. It is yet another artists studio, expressed this time as an elegantly slim little tower with a pyramidal roof. The projecting eaves are supported by the daintiest steel brackets possible which break delightfully to let the chimney pass through.</div>
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Voysey himself added an extension at the side which slightly reduces the building's compositional purity. As remarked by Nairn in his London architecture guide, south parade is Voysey's most art nouveu and urban design, a world away in many senses from his ground hugging houses in more suburban and rural locations. Instead, it sits perky and upright, very dainty and, yes, vaguely reminiscent of Vienna or Paris.<br />
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At the back a north light wraps over to follow the pitch of the roof, again breaking through the eaves line and showing Voysey's careful attention to functional matters.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKy8tPPbIPOsq20Vh-Kr7ZKRrNlVO8RUsMDP_OuGWEClsAHgAMRsf2MzrlHmkG4bRWkHPxj8UW4CNeTCm-csUgTJl7FJ4RdFa0JAk6xFjXpFpIm15eURrygBkXRWP6ZhCS16dtF5R0sY/s1600/IMG_7330.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimKy8tPPbIPOsq20Vh-Kr7ZKRrNlVO8RUsMDP_OuGWEClsAHgAMRsf2MzrlHmkG4bRWkHPxj8UW4CNeTCm-csUgTJl7FJ4RdFa0JAk6xFjXpFpIm15eURrygBkXRWP6ZhCS16dtF5R0sY/s320/IMG_7330.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Voyey's reputation today is an odd one. On the one hand, he is celebrated as a kind of proto-modernist, a precursor to the more progressive and puritanical white-walled international style to come. On the other he influenced countless suburban houses, pantiled and rough rendered pseudo-cottages the country over. Although he had no time for modernism, his work can still partly be seen in its light, especially a building like South Parade. The care and attention to detail of the most humdrum domestic elements links him in some way to the modernist experiments in living, the interest in ergonomics and both household efficiency and comfort. He was in some ways, a strict functionalist. albeit a romantic one.<br />
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Like Lutyens, he attempted to combine the ramshackle vernacular house with more sophisticated aspects of geometry and composition. With Voysey, these formal concerns are incredibly subtle and never dominate the gentleness of the whole. His houses manage instead to be highly refined and carefully composed and seemingly loose and casual at the same time. This is an almost impossible trick to pull off in architecture and maybe Voysey's brilliance was to hit on a certain formula that allowed him to do it time and again. The slightly austere but comforting avuncularity of the materials allowed him to play very precise games with proportion, scale and texture whilst rarely straying from middlebrow acceptability.<br />
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Only once or twice, as at Broadleys and Bedford Park, did he do anything that could be seen as radical but in housing that might also be a blessing. Instead, he developed an entire idiom of housing, an image of home that is still incredibly popular today.<br />
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At this point my hands were so cold I dropped my iphone on the pavement with a resounding splat resulting in some smashed glass and an expensive bill. So, we headed for Turnham Green station and (various) homes, artistic or otherwise.</div>
Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-17650864868051750972013-03-25T13:50:00.002+00:002013-03-25T13:50:37.561+00:00Models on film<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/w1J0pUURCj8" width="420"></iframe>
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In advance of going to see <a href="http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2009/architecture-on-film/mock-ups-in-close-up-architectural-models-in-film">this film</a> about architectural models as film sets, here's a nicely wonky and thoroughly unconvincing bit of architectural set design, courtesy of Alfred Hitchock. </div>
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Wait for the title credits to end and gasp as the camera pans over a majestic mountain range before zooming towards a remote train station in the snow. The bit with the car is particularly charming given that it serves very little purpose other than to draw attention to the fact that the east European village in which the film begins is actually a small model built in the Gainsborough studios in Shoreditch. </div>
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<br />Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-64008476185077828472013-03-10T23:37:00.001+00:002013-03-12T09:26:42.526+00:00The death and life of the English village<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<i>This year my students at <a href="http://cantarch.com/">UCA, Canterbury</a> have been looking at ruralism and 20th century villages*. Two of these - East Tilbury in Essex and Whiteley in Surrey - are places I've read about, talked about and generally pontificated on but never visited so over the last month I have made journeys to both. </i></div>
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<i>What follows are photographs and observations from both trips. The photos of Whiteley in particular were very rushed as I had a bored family drumming their fingers in the car. There are further and far superior photos, drawings and films of the villages on our <a href="http://electricedens.tumblr.com/">studio blog</a> ** which I have linked to at the bottom of this post.....</i></div>
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Whiteley lies on the edge of Weybridge, a well-healed suburban enclave in stockbroker belt Surrey. John Lennon once lived there and Elton John still does, along with a welter of other, lesser celebrities. It's expensive basically, prime real estate on the southern fringe of London. The roads roll gently through a landscape that is leafy and affluent and full of gated communities with little sentry boxes guarding their exclusive avenues.<br />
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Sitting amongst all this is Whiteley, a retirement village built in 1907 by William Whiteley, the owner of the west London department store. It is both entirely typical of the area and strangely alien. It is laid out as an octagon, a pure geometric form sitting incongruously in the gentle surrounding countryside. From the air it looks like a crop circle or some ancient and very impressive earthwork. It has a rationalist rigour, reminiscent of 19th century architects like Ledoux and Boulee. Very un-English in other words and seemingly free of the picturesque planning that you might expect in a place like this.<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">Wandering around Whiteley is a strange experience. It is odd for a start to visit somewhere where it is so obvious that you don't belong. No one in Whiteley is under 65 so architectural tourists are even more conspicuous than normal. Its relative obscurity though means that you can pretty much wander around quite happily as they are hardly deluged with visitors. And of course, everyone is very nice.</span></div>
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The other odd thing is the scale. The buildings are small, positively dinky in fact. But they are also set within impressive amounts of space. The density is closer to that of a wealthy US suburb than the more tightly packed European norm. Houses are set within acres of lawn and with the surrounding trees clear visible between them. Even in winter with many of the trees bare and the gardens not in flower, the landscape shares at least equal billing with the buildings.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTPSKzfiwVrYS6KXgd8aIGkzW9hshXl8NKoqNYt5N2H23YXoDl3XZbv5Q9VfIKa6iUz0REu0WyvfvSlZuR0lp2TRJ4LqvbcXAfpszBIEBG27KM1oxAWQfui7P-20j3BTz3Wet1PHGvv4/s1600/IMG_2468.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheTPSKzfiwVrYS6KXgd8aIGkzW9hshXl8NKoqNYt5N2H23YXoDl3XZbv5Q9VfIKa6iUz0REu0WyvfvSlZuR0lp2TRJ4LqvbcXAfpszBIEBG27KM1oxAWQfui7P-20j3BTz3Wet1PHGvv4/s320/IMG_2468.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Whiteley is a model village in that sense of having one of everything you might need: a church, a shop, a post office, a community hall. The hall is the grandest building, a beautiful arts and crafts essay in purple and red brickwork and with a superb proscenium arch interior. When I visited it also had a large metal tea urn gently bubbling away in the kitchen inside, which was pretty much exactly what you would hope to find there. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8vONPhI4kmlmwtw0Q__7T1VnBLESmwaDiB8IVQaaGWMBiQ0N_7OyAJ9mZxqHWjY6Wmr_qPbSwOW4Pmqb_sIwsrZvMopoyHvtdoULB8w9dV-FzHZ9WOswr2bigqNhPz2T6xS9hZe1T1I/s1600/IMG_2470.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjD8vONPhI4kmlmwtw0Q__7T1VnBLESmwaDiB8IVQaaGWMBiQ0N_7OyAJ9mZxqHWjY6Wmr_qPbSwOW4Pmqb_sIwsrZvMopoyHvtdoULB8w9dV-FzHZ9WOswr2bigqNhPz2T6xS9hZe1T1I/s320/IMG_2470.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Whiteley, like its residents, looks very well looked after. In fact it is quite pristine. The houses and cottages have been lived in and accumulated domestic clutter - including one with a 1/3 scale wooden model of an elephant - but they are also immaculately maintained. There are no additions, no UPVC windows and no pebble dash. Depending on where you stand (and I'm never entirely sure on this question) this is either a blessed relief or mildly terrifying. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAaXDbXQLO-X95LBhs5oeFEhNXvHiqfmQTPARUEszl9Ychu2vjaWEX1qHRCBFQx8Zd7eD_8PNvm9bMati7Ybus-tKhhENag-BHjwBgG4fB-w9buZxqHwXiEeyYrcYRyLhts9M4t_O_CvA/s1600/IMG_2471.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAaXDbXQLO-X95LBhs5oeFEhNXvHiqfmQTPARUEszl9Ychu2vjaWEX1qHRCBFQx8Zd7eD_8PNvm9bMati7Ybus-tKhhENag-BHjwBgG4fB-w9buZxqHwXiEeyYrcYRyLhts9M4t_O_CvA/s320/IMG_2471.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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What's true is that you would be very hard pushed to find a better preserved collection of high quality arts and crafts buildings anywhere in the country. There are nearly three hundred listed buildings here, all exquisitely detailed and sharing features such as twisted 'barley sugar' columns and subtly patterned brickwork.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6OW5eVgquaVZ9bgE6rtcQNIkAlZ6_RSCWKddenVIfeA7Er9hOp4HnAe2KrfjK0f_ctWWGlnSOpyRSShiphfev1VzbP9X-ii1N-fOJRSUSMzbtSSVfDe_pBw_9TkaEkOL91emyoXN6j0/s1600/IMG_2466.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK6OW5eVgquaVZ9bgE6rtcQNIkAlZ6_RSCWKddenVIfeA7Er9hOp4HnAe2KrfjK0f_ctWWGlnSOpyRSShiphfev1VzbP9X-ii1N-fOJRSUSMzbtSSVfDe_pBw_9TkaEkOL91emyoXN6j0/s320/IMG_2466.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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East Tilbury is - to use a technical architectural term - a different kettle of fish altogether. It was built in the early 1930's by Tomas Bata as a UK outpost of his vast, global shoe manufacturing business. It is much better known than Whitely, mostly on account of its modernist housing and factory buildings that loom incongruously out of the Essex marshes just before they disappear altogether into the Thames estuary. It is a kind of twin to the original Bata town of Zlin in the Czech Republic, in which Thomas Bata rather scarily had <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/091124/tale-two-utopias">an office built inside an elevator</a> in order to survey his workforce.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOF9XKBqJn7EvUuxyISXrewdGz16RYEnITI-LRpRgxr5ZRvM6KNh5P65YweQrlJ7M-Yufz_ZoHGTtFXIL4NYMdalYcEnw7bVoUzBVfiPwNRycreCxArjDOreDWTjk4FdU-fdkwAWY05T0/s1600/Tilbury+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOF9XKBqJn7EvUuxyISXrewdGz16RYEnITI-LRpRgxr5ZRvM6KNh5P65YweQrlJ7M-Yufz_ZoHGTtFXIL4NYMdalYcEnw7bVoUzBVfiPwNRycreCxArjDOreDWTjk4FdU-fdkwAWY05T0/s320/Tilbury+1.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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When <a href="http://jongoodbun.wordpress.com/">we</a> visited it one chilly, late winter's afternoon a mist seemed to descend over the buildings giving it an even gloomier countenance than it might normally have. The factory is of course closed now and the bits that seem to be in any kind of use are employed for that growth industry of the UK, self-storage. This is grimly inappropriate, as the future suggested by East Tilbury was one of well-designed, reasonably generous workers housing. Instead, as our housing stock has got both worse and less and less plentiful, our city fringes have filled up with vast warehouses used to store all the stuff we can no longer find room for.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8Idbj69-KzLE6miFq3ZPmtLEptNUS9C3z7LI-Hw5dYWEP2WU4X0UEMcpuXjPoLlwufNS6V3WXAAhFlOt51A94pX7_3oymLfCcaF0NlqkqEAN40Eb_yfLd8lMvpHv-aTF2HtEa2bOsFA/s1600/Tilbury+17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8Idbj69-KzLE6miFq3ZPmtLEptNUS9C3z7LI-Hw5dYWEP2WU4X0UEMcpuXjPoLlwufNS6V3WXAAhFlOt51A94pX7_3oymLfCcaF0NlqkqEAN40Eb_yfLd8lMvpHv-aTF2HtEa2bOsFA/s320/Tilbury+17.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Anyway, the largely empty factory buildings are still hugely impressive, unrelenting slabs of glass and stucco with elegantly rounded columns providing steady punctuation. The flaking stucco and general air of sad neglect offers plenty of money shots for the ruin-porn enthusiast. As we approached the furthest end of the factory complex, two men who appeared to be digging some kind of hole, looked up and stopped. We stared at each other for a while before deciding it was best to turn around.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxXLfHP5TnLeleD6OqIKcMFQ9LT4VnVlwlmZqqGyzmpBGOLUxypKDNFTqsO3109qi4DK4Qe6UYDc9QKsfbBu4iJx5BGSxXEAZ9FnA-Zeyyu2JDuvEy5CsFqd1zI6C6zvjdGQuCECMHYqA/s1600/Tilbury+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxXLfHP5TnLeleD6OqIKcMFQ9LT4VnVlwlmZqqGyzmpBGOLUxypKDNFTqsO3109qi4DK4Qe6UYDc9QKsfbBu4iJx5BGSxXEAZ9FnA-Zeyyu2JDuvEy5CsFqd1zI6C6zvjdGQuCECMHYqA/s320/Tilbury+6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuwCbVlJfDQA477HfuiJl0XSAsDC-8fvQBDV3HFq-_xuIG5JBQILmCl-4-xQgfILU0iUE78sGPIJr9rkDG6nNnukwIY4MZUJsiI9rWpLi5-3YI5IrK50Hmk_u5acazGbjIs-u18KlGrcI/s1600/Tilbury+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuwCbVlJfDQA477HfuiJl0XSAsDC-8fvQBDV3HFq-_xuIG5JBQILmCl-4-xQgfILU0iUE78sGPIJr9rkDG6nNnukwIY4MZUJsiI9rWpLi5-3YI5IrK50Hmk_u5acazGbjIs-u18KlGrcI/s320/Tilbury+4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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A couple of the factory buildings nearest to the town have been refurbished and are being offered as office space, although its hard to imagine anyone having the desire to move out here. Looking in at their vacant factory floors, my companion wondered whether it would be feasible to set up an office in one, surrounded by space and the lowering Essex skies. I can see some downsides. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9I1_GisO0tqmrVvisXy_Lvdx35IBuG_Ce80Aj5Yy2oDb_qQVZUJHJtv1vmtzRdvBYLftAEILcBLvcT3qaLKD8Uvr5gnWleu7PUp9v2ZPEclCegAUMrH8X6p-CSB_Rwlsz7u1m1OsJPwg/s1600/Tilbury+8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9I1_GisO0tqmrVvisXy_Lvdx35IBuG_Ce80Aj5Yy2oDb_qQVZUJHJtv1vmtzRdvBYLftAEILcBLvcT3qaLKD8Uvr5gnWleu7PUp9v2ZPEclCegAUMrH8X6p-CSB_Rwlsz7u1m1OsJPwg/s320/Tilbury+8.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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The housing is laid out on a garden city suburb plan with roads of small semi-detached worker housing fanning out from a radial center occupied by larger, manager's houses. These latter have large open verandas which seemed particularly optimistic on the day we visited. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEYnu0MG1bxhonvtNo0U51YlWUrJwYSCEE5EfV__NDpVnwvkblTb2tUlP-4eS6iSdxJ2Ys9eoWKXESpKrT4TGGO4TcmPdlCA0H-ssQ94KTwlU-nFFUkQ0kHKZVkktzDAr1O7q1wxcPak/s1600/Tilbury+16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEYnu0MG1bxhonvtNo0U51YlWUrJwYSCEE5EfV__NDpVnwvkblTb2tUlP-4eS6iSdxJ2Ys9eoWKXESpKrT4TGGO4TcmPdlCA0H-ssQ94KTwlU-nFFUkQ0kHKZVkktzDAr1O7q1wxcPak/s320/Tilbury+16.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The houses have undergone various amounts of alterations, so that often the original details are buried under innumerable layers of pebble-dash and some fairly bizarre extensions. I'm no conservation purist, quite the opposite really, but much of the original character of the place has undoubtedly disappeared. At East Tilbury, the indignity of the UPVC window upgrade has been extended to the factory buildings with mildly tragic consequences.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnODTldjBTm3b6R67HGpxRWsyclHRT7UaSaSwJVoelv20TbLt4blEYotyb4t2lCauyw_vDORxRagw5RVWU68cJNxVcNrFb4Ub6hS7MN22hmaZQumU-6JI9Ag58AFEaxU-e5n52ZcVJpY/s1600/Tilbury+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnODTldjBTm3b6R67HGpxRWsyclHRT7UaSaSwJVoelv20TbLt4blEYotyb4t2lCauyw_vDORxRagw5RVWU68cJNxVcNrFb4Ub6hS7MN22hmaZQumU-6JI9Ag58AFEaxU-e5n52ZcVJpY/s320/Tilbury+3.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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It's still possible to discern in some of the houses, the restrained elegance of the original vision, when the flat roofs projected with a modest flourish beyond the wall line. As I say, it's dangerous to be purist about this, not least because I find conservation area stuffiness problematic and because there's undoubtedly a class issue around all this. It's more that the original houses are better than much of what gets built today. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRoCMclBqigHImMFhH4fMeIeObE9pF25MvV133uUxmV6UwSlXITtQRhTU3RxZIim-cFvIjvCq_IfP1WguFna-Aubpizg3PkGarE67oeSqq1OxetFBuM1TGi0Ydm9V11YsNW9JStI0MjuU/s1600/Tilbury+14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRoCMclBqigHImMFhH4fMeIeObE9pF25MvV133uUxmV6UwSlXITtQRhTU3RxZIim-cFvIjvCq_IfP1WguFna-Aubpizg3PkGarE67oeSqq1OxetFBuM1TGi0Ydm9V11YsNW9JStI0MjuU/s320/Tilbury+14.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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A large, impressive ocean-liner of a building in the centre of East Tilbury now contains some pretty basic shops but was once the village hotel. This is one of the first buildings you notice as you arrive and its scale and impressive logic is completely unexpected. Even more than the houses, it seems to have set sail from east Europe before coming to rest by a small, country lane in the middle of nowhere.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqcYBcB65Xskw4yFglnFD9cj7hA3NSJa9RhIRe7PkSc_GGG_PvFCMAEfm_utEspdAnx3UwPijB-Uxvtqc0wTEeC1g7bRjyYN0sGA9avssZCK8YU8Rb4eelGBDPrAba9gB77v3rDqp9qh0/s1600/Tilbury+18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqcYBcB65Xskw4yFglnFD9cj7hA3NSJa9RhIRe7PkSc_GGG_PvFCMAEfm_utEspdAnx3UwPijB-Uxvtqc0wTEeC1g7bRjyYN0sGA9avssZCK8YU8Rb4eelGBDPrAba9gB77v3rDqp9qh0/s320/Tilbury+18.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The cinema and social club have also closed down. The village hall, painted (perhaps originally) in two shades of brown is still going and was encouraging people to hold their party there, albeit in a fairly desultory manner.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVY0R8EE76j2makC9uPgiUS_VgfN-v4v3sf2sWnDQ641YppMzLCmdEr3VliIBHhy6a2AgSJGAtrhHqMlZVsxEr5F_bRqdyPSt6jTtMvm-67eLcriDd8Sqtt0h4hKvIEt1jetxc0dj7yrs/s1600/Tilbury+13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVY0R8EE76j2makC9uPgiUS_VgfN-v4v3sf2sWnDQ641YppMzLCmdEr3VliIBHhy6a2AgSJGAtrhHqMlZVsxEr5F_bRqdyPSt6jTtMvm-67eLcriDd8Sqtt0h4hKvIEt1jetxc0dj7yrs/s320/Tilbury+13.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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East Tilbury is a close cousin to Silver End, another modernist Essex village based around a now defunct industry. Both were featured recently in Jonathan Meades' excellent The Joy of Essex. Of the two Tilbury is the far more desolate. The Crittal window factory that sustained Silver End has closed but the village seems to have lived on slightly more successfully. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZwHIuWJ-CV6SHaRl7nJ9EtxtJV-WQY1dTsiRwjhQOsLV4VYateWZBzF9mahuKeq82y983szMp_K8E6NMrVkbbfA5NS7jmPSzWHrcZEOFXjD4MZdH5hMxZokIetV5mvYgh33moJ9M_z0c/s1600/Tilbury+7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZwHIuWJ-CV6SHaRl7nJ9EtxtJV-WQY1dTsiRwjhQOsLV4VYateWZBzF9mahuKeq82y983szMp_K8E6NMrVkbbfA5NS7jmPSzWHrcZEOFXjD4MZdH5hMxZokIetV5mvYgh33moJ9M_z0c/s320/Tilbury+7.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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East Tilbury has an undeniably 'end of the line' quality, unsurprising really given that there is little beyond it other than flat fields and muddy brown water. There are plans, which you can read about <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2006/jun/19/architecture">here</a>, but this is not the Surrey hills and I wouldn't hold your breath.<br />
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Looked at as a pair, Tilbury and Whiteley are fascinating. Both are the products of a paternalistic philanthropic vision, an idealistic capitalism that now seems thoroughly benign in relation to the version we have today. They could hardly be more different either, a beautifully preserved arts and crafts retirement village and a crumbling industrial suburb. It's remarkable really that they were built just twenty odd years apart. In their current condition they exemplify much about our current situation too. </div>
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<i>* The subject matter for this year's studio was partly inspired by <a href="https://twitter.com/floratrype">Gillian Darley's</a> book Villages of Vision. The book's final chapter - No New Villages? - was the jumping off point for proposing some 21st century rural settlements. </i><br />
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<i>** Some of their work can be seen over at the studio's <a href="http://electricedens.tumblr.com/">Electric Edens</a> Tumblr. For more about Whiteley, watch UCA students Sam Brewer and Michelle Sweeney's very nice film <a href="http://electricedens.tumblr.com/post/35200362613/a-post-graduate-diploma-film-by-samantha-brewer">here</a>. And for an intriguing mash-up of present day East Tilbury, historic footage and heroic Bata promotional music watch<a href="http://electricedens.tumblr.com/post/35127374907/east-tilbury-essex-modernist-garden-suburb-built"> this</a> film, by Maria Mantikou, Dana Mahmoud and George Liaramantzas.</i></div>
Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-52267388139979237622013-03-10T20:54:00.002+00:002013-03-11T14:57:05.291+00:00Neither Up Nor Down<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Recently I wrote a short piece about the joys of elevated walkways and ambiguous ground levels for Matzine, an architecture fanzine edited by Stephen Mackie and Sean McAlister. Here's the opening few paragraphs and a link to read the rest:</span></i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM5W-BKjqjWgD8jy3ylZmjDkatF90-PGiaEKKxHUcVp72CJzUIEEe2qdl8hdob-Gmun4m55TXkZfDD1_UK4jri2JwzpHXUJ3jTMIWqDPKEbBEwnlv_NovCAphBxUJQrEyTOybw5cETJUk/s1600/PwfYp.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhM5W-BKjqjWgD8jy3ylZmjDkatF90-PGiaEKKxHUcVp72CJzUIEEe2qdl8hdob-Gmun4m55TXkZfDD1_UK4jri2JwzpHXUJ3jTMIWqDPKEbBEwnlv_NovCAphBxUJQrEyTOybw5cETJUk/s320/PwfYp.tiff" width="240" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In her book Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture
as Mass Media, Beatriz
Colomina contrasts Adolf Loos’ use of the stair with Le Corbusier’s employment
of the ramp in their respective house designs. Colomina notes that Loos’ stairs
often perform a theatrical role, acting as an architectural promenade that
gives views onto the ‘stage’ of domestic life. Loos’ domestic compositions
hinge around a spiralling upward motion with the stair at the centre linking a
series of spaces that Colomina codes as either stage or theatre box.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">By contrast, she notes that the ramp in Le Corbusier’s
work suggests a more cinematic experience, one where we move through the a
series of ‘cuts’ in the domestic realm, analogous to the montage effects of
film. While Loos’ stair opens onto a series of discrete stage-like rooms, Le
Corbusier’s ramp passes through several different spaces simultaneously.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Colomina likens this movement to the action of the film
camera. The ramp exploits a desire for fluidity and movement amid the flows and
eddies of contemporary urban experience. It’s a compelling observation and one
that also seems to capture the shift from Loos’ work, with its fragments of
plush 19<sup>th</sup> century life, to Le Corbusier’s thoroughly 20<sup>th</sup>
century sensibility. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The ramp thus forms a key component within modern
architecture, suggesting almost a mechanisation of the act of walking or
traversing space. It also allows a greater fluidity between the different
levels and floorplates of buildings and the spaces between them. Being neither
up now down becomes a valid destination in its own right......<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">.....you can download the rest of the essay <a href="http://matzine.org/matzine-12/">here</a>. </span></i></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-71556969912374912782013-03-07T23:44:00.000+00:002013-03-07T23:44:04.164+00:00James Bond: Architecture Critic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyNtOmGiR_p0pBwmyXfQ1kyjPEuXy3k_BI6wjx9YXxILVKaYc3ymMtPQzFcmiSUFBv6rr14Cq2eJxX4BwwUdJYo6Jfh3nAJAQC9gszQfnu-_O3hbn8NqY1o3zF9bLhCZ4Fo89Lx20KZXk/s1600/Goldfinger003.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyNtOmGiR_p0pBwmyXfQ1kyjPEuXy3k_BI6wjx9YXxILVKaYc3ymMtPQzFcmiSUFBv6rr14Cq2eJxX4BwwUdJYo6Jfh3nAJAQC9gszQfnu-_O3hbn8NqY1o3zF9bLhCZ4Fo89Lx20KZXk/s320/Goldfinger003.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bond prepares to destory another Ken Adam designed set at the start of Goldfinger.</span></div>
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In a very obvious way, Ian Fleming's novel Goldfinger can be regarded as a critique of modern architecture. It is well documented that Fleming based his eponymous hero on Erno Goldfinger, the architect of London's Balfron and Trellick Towers. Fleming, an old-fashioned (even for the 1950's) big C Conservative reputedly detested the Russian emigre architect. For him, Goldfinger epitomised both the megalomania of modern architects and a wider threat of continental European socialism.</div>
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This fairly straightforward piece of reactionary characterisation fits easily into Fleming's oevure. Goldfinger takes his place in roll-call of xenophobic stereotypes that also includes Hugo Drax and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Fleming's fondness for the emerging consumer culture of the 1950's though cuts across this imperialist morality and brings with it a certain - albeit throughly commercialised - form of modernism. The fast cars, gadgets and globe trotting break out of the fusty Victorianism of Fleming's world view despite himself.</div>
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His love of up-to-the-minute technology permeates the films much more thoroughly. These increasingly based themselves on a slightly fantastical imminent future. This technological futurism extends to the architecture too which throughout the 1960's and 70's is frequently modernist. As is well known, the sets for the films of this period were designed by Ken Adam in a rich amalgam of modernist styles. </div>
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As well as Adams' sets, the films often made use of genuine examples of modern architecture including the rotating Alpine restaurant in On Her Majesties Secret Service and John Lautner's Elrod House in Diamond's Are Forever. The use of the latter as a locations in particular is far from hostile or emblematic of incipient megolamania. It doesn't belong to the villain and, unusually it isn't blown up at the end by Bond either.</div>
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<img border="0" height="176" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCwrwSVYQIEY3CDpjlOG9VPPOK_l_OtpKqs0RmmmtasXIWMrr1XLgqoL7ZmVhq2HtCxcOlkgt1YhoCPiJ4tb8IsBgkaTd7DGcBgOATXa9391_6sNTW7EXfcUuGIxjK434uHXofyJff8frH/s400/DiamondsAreForever+006.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Bond enters John Lautner's Elrod House in Diamond's Are Forever.</span><br />
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Bond's favoured method of architectural criticism is high explosives. Most of Adams' sets are destroyed in the climatic scene that almost invariably involves Bond throwing hand grenades at boiler suited lackeys escaping via monorails and collapsing perspex bridges. But, as the use of the Elrod House suggests, Bond's attitude to modernism is not entirely hostile.</div>
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But back to Goldfinger, which contains, appropriately enough, Fleming's most <i>architectural</i> plot. Much of the early part of the book takes place close to (Fleming's) home on the east coast of Kent. Goldfinger's lair is in Reculver, on the Isle of Thanet and Bond spends the night in a hotel in Ramsgate. Goldfinger's house is described in the book as a somewhat depressing, Victorian grange though which Bond takes an instant dislike to. </div>
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Fleming has previous form here having based his previous novel Moonraker on the Kent coast too, this time in Kingsdown just outside of Dover, where that novel's villain Hugo Drax also lives in a grimly old fashioned pile. Interestingly, for all his apparent dislike of modern architecture, Fleming chose an undistinguished and gloomy Victorian neo-Gothic style to symbolise his villain's dark subconscious.<br />
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In the film, Goldfinger's house in Kentucky, where Bond is taken as a captive, represents one of Ken Adam's first full-on architectural set designs. The house itself is a kind of essay in late Frank Loyd Wright Praire Style, with rubble stone walls, timber cantilevers and raking windows. Inside it Goldfinger has installed a large model of the US gold depository at Fort Knox, which he intends to attack with a dirty bomb.</div>
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This model appears to have been constructed on the underside of the floor of Goldfinger's living room for reasons that are never made entirely clear. Whatever, at the touch of a button on the control panel - itself hidden below a rotating billiard table - the floor slides open to reveal Goldfinger's Hornby scale heist set. Alongside this model Goldfinger has also mounted an enormous black and white photograph of Fort Knox, the size of an advertisting billboard. It is an undeniably impressive crit presentation. </div>
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Having escaped from a cell somewhere in the basement of the house, Bond pops up within this model, squeezing his head inside Fort Knox itself in order to spy on Goldfinger explaining his dastardly plan. <span style="text-align: start;">In a strange act of miniaturisation, Bond is trapped within a model within Goldfinger's house. He is thus doubly ensnared within architecture.</span></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Adams' design is fabulous, the prototypical set for all subsequent Bond films and the subject of endless spoofs and parodies. It equates forever the image of the villain with his giant model plotting to take over the world. Models here are equated with a lust for a power. Their scale flatters the villain into thinking that he is in control, able to enact his will with minimum resistance. </span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">It is at this point that Fleming - or perhaps Adam - slips in a more compelling critique of architecture than we might have previously supposed. Fleming's litany of hideous caricature villains always want to replace what they see as an imperfect world with something of their own devising. A utopia of sorts, albeit usually for the benefit of one. It is Bond's job to stop them. As impressive as the representations of their planned new worlds are, it must be destroyed. As the author of <a href="http://www.filmchronicles.com/goldfinger/">this </a>blog puts it, we can never again trust anyone with a giant model. </span>Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-76317958722627194902013-01-13T14:42:00.000+00:002013-01-13T14:44:15.690+00:00New Year Old Me<div style="text-align: justify;">
Like Chris Rea's Driving Home For Christmas, there is nothing as unwanted as a christmas post after christmas, so I've come up with a cunning ruse for a new one. Which is what used to be known in the trade as the "What I've Been up to" post. So.....</div>
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...I've written a few things for elsewhere, almost none of which can be found online. One which might find its way there sometime is on the 20th Century Society's book on architecture in the 1970's, in the current issue of <a href="http://www.architecturetoday.co.uk/?p=26243">Architecture Today</a>. A short precis though: architecture in the 1970's was mostly louche, tasteless or banal. The book is none of those.</div>
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Another is a review of Jonathan Meades latest book Museum Without Walls, which was in last month's issue of <a href="http://www.iconeye.com/">Icon</a>. Now that's come and gone it feels safe to post it here. So here - ta da! - it is. It's written 'in the style of' one of Meades' TV scripts, a wheeze that felt like a good idea at the time, mainly because I had already read a few very insightful reviews of Meades' book and I didn't want to merely repeat points better made elsewhere. If the review doesn't make this altogether clear, I should say that, in simple terms, I liked the book. Anyway......</div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">(Imaginary Television
Script #1)<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><u><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Who is
Jonathan Meades?<o:p></o:p></span></u></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Titles: A man is sitting
reading a book. Sometimes he smiles to himself or scratches his head as if
confused. Occasionally he shakes his head vigorously. Eventually he puts the
book down and looks up at the camera. It is your Icon Reviewer (IR). He leans
forward and speaks:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Who is Jonathan Meades?
Is he an architecture critic?
Or a historian? A novelist? Or a TV presenter?
Does <i>this</i> (IR waves book at camera) –
which includes
short essays, opinion pieces and scripts
from his numerous television programmes – offer
any answers?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A police identity line-up:
The camera pans past a motley collection of individuals including Iain
Sinclair, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ian Nairn and a man dressed in a dark suit and
sunglasses. The camera does a ‘double-take’ and tracks back to the man in
shades. It is Jonathan Meades (JM).<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> His style draws on some
of the encyclopedic knowledge
of Pevsner, the righteous passion of Nairnand
th e mannered despair of Sinclair. He adds a certain sardonic wit
and a very post-modern self-awareness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Westfield Shopping Centre:
JM is hanging out. He is wearing a T-shirt with an <i>I’ve been to Westfield</i> logo on it and Ugg boots and is carrying at
least a dozen shopping bags. He is playing very loud and very tinny music on an
MP3 player.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Meades dislikes a lot
of things. He makes long lists of
them including; Tony Blair, the picturesque,urban
regeneration, the infantilising effects of popular
culture, neo-Georgian-ism, God, the Nazis and
most architects. His list of likes is shorter and
includes; Brutalism, Edwin Lutyens and Birmingham.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A vast titanium object sits
in a bleak plaza. It is unmistakably reminiscent of an enormous metallic turd.
A plastic banner flaps beside it bearing the legend “Art Dump”, written in
Comic Sans. The camera pans back to reveal JM repeatedly hitting the object
with a hammer. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">He rails against
suburban expansion, rural nostalgia <i>and</i> inner-city redevelopment. He is as
furious about
naughties urban <i>re</i>generation as he is
about eighties
urban <i>de</i>generation, although not
without good
reason.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The English countryside:
The cast of Downton Abbey driving blacked-out Range Rovers have encircled a
peasant family and are shooting at them. Nearby, Rolf Harris has set up his
easel in order to catch the charming scene. Enter JM, this time wearing a
hard-hat and carrying a large blueprint for a Grand Designs style gaff. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">His TV programmes
subvert the tradition of the pompous
‘man of culture’ talking to camera. Like Adam
Curtis, Meades plays with the rules and traditions
of the medium. Visual gags, allusions to our
collective TV memory bank and a sense of the absurd<span style="color: red;"> </span>cut
across the more straightforward verbal polemic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The camera pans along an
arterial road, possibly the north circular. Houses covered in brake-dust shake
as articulated lorries transporting garden ornaments hurtle by. “All this’, JM
is shouting, “is the fault of just one man: William Morris”.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">He has a tendency
towards the sweeping generalisation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">JM is driving through a
city street of crumbling terraces and burnt-out cars. “Only in the UK”, he
says, “is the term inner-city synonymous with poverty and decay”. As he talks,
he passes himself coming the other way making the same point. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">And he repeats himself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">JM is now sitting in the
reviewer’s chair reading his own book. IR leans into view, wearing a pair of
dark glasses. He speaks to camera:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Meades is an
old-fashioned critic in disguise. Reading
his book is a bit like being repeatedly shouted
at. Which is why the TV scripts, with their playful
absurdity and self-awareness, are the most enjoyable
thing here, ironically enough.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Courier; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">JM throws book away in
exasperation and switches on telly.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-31552704366510570072012-12-25T19:16:00.001+00:002013-01-01T15:03:59.945+00:00Christmas Cow Shed Blues<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqtPAc1D9OirBfbEtszLN-ALcCOxLvMO0AabJTU7w2ZjewpUKEA1DTjlVbhf3FLevqClrFkKZcFMJTtbAtpnnFIYhayVzcr2tDute2sIHGs7Od26HzKhokk_okKDgxcXYM0GoyKrEuV8o/s1600/5047932.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqtPAc1D9OirBfbEtszLN-ALcCOxLvMO0AabJTU7w2ZjewpUKEA1DTjlVbhf3FLevqClrFkKZcFMJTtbAtpnnFIYhayVzcr2tDute2sIHGs7Od26HzKhokk_okKDgxcXYM0GoyKrEuV8o/s320/5047932.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The publication of pictures of Stephen Taylor's cow shed in <a href="http://www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/">Building Design</a> this week prompted a classic chorus of "You must be having us on" and "Isn't it appalling" from the philistine wing of British architecture.</div>
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On the surface it's not hard to see why it might wind up those of a delicate disposition. 'Fake' arches, a vestigial colonnade and some deliberately crude detailing, all things guaranteed to confuse the dedicated English empiricist. Not only are references to classicism - or any other form of historical architecture outside the compulsory canon of Corb, Mies and Aalto - deemed unacceptable, but here they are applied to a humble cow shed. A decorated cow-shed no less. So we are in the land of ambiguity here, where one thing might masquerade as another or allude to something that it isn't.</div>
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For a certain kind of British architect, ambiguity and ambivalence are deeply suspect. A simple-minded literalness pervades their architecture, a desire for the clear articulation of elements at the expense of richness or depth of meaning. A column is a column, a wall is a wall, a roof is a roof, and each should be clearly differentiated from the other. This obsession with clarity of articulation goes some way to explaining the current obsession with the 'shadow gap', that subtly insidious detail expressing difference between the wall, floor and ceiling. </div>
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The shadow gap clarifies the wall as a plane, distinct and visually bounded. With a shadow gap there can be no merging of elements and no mannerist ambiguity between parts. Its visual neatness coupled with a sense of everything being in its rightful place, clearly appeals to a puritanical Anglo-Saxon mindset.</div>
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It's revealing then, that some of the comments regarding Taylor's shed should focus on its detailing. 'Good detailing' in the sense implied here is all about visual proprietary and aesthetic neatness. It would be beyond the pale therefore to detail anything to look deliberately crude, or messy or rough. Faced with an unfamiliar or even faintly curious object, a desire for familiar aesthetic categories takes hold.</div>
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There is something else here too, something that reminds me of a comment made by a friend recently. Very little new architecture is in anyway difficult to look at. Difficulty - in the sense of something being challenging or not immediately understandable - is a rare commodity in contemporary architecture. So much of its production is simply about nice detailing, neatness, good taste. But buildings can also validly express conflict, or unresolved, contradictory forces and imperatives.</div>
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By conflict I emphatically don't mean outlandish or supposedly abrasive form making, the faux-radicalism of deconstructionism or parametricism. Instead I mean something not entirely settled, something that risks being unresolved according to conventional compositional rules. Or simply, not neatly tied up according to a limited repertoire of accepted modernist elements. </div>
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Very little new architecture strays from the tenets of good taste, modernism-lite. That's why the howls of derision that greet anything that does are so telling. So, hats off to Stephen Taylor for designing something that isn't easy to digest, that requires some thought and attention and that asks some interesting visual questions of us. It's only a humble cow shed but, as we know, humble cow sheds can take on a certain level of symbolic significance at this time of year.</div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-67706363391008319252012-12-18T23:05:00.000+00:002012-12-19T20:05:30.457+00:00The Visitor<span style="text-align: justify;"><i>I recently visited the village of Portmeirion in Wales, along with my students from the the <a href="http://electricedens.tumblr.com/">Electric Edens</a> studio at <a href="http://cantarch.com/">UCA, Canterbury.</a> The following are some observations from a (mostly rainy) couple of days in the peculiar, dinky and dream-like village in the Welsh hills. </i></span><br />
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</span><span style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9smTIiDdNgXDaE_du22lHMHo4zb4DyDU_DYtVL_eZlU4YjQzuoFix_X9wDklUxLec53-ES-m5JgYW-cvrup92aI5yNSJW9WclmJoJxmPnEX3p0UaCbaxVpL_JmOXpC26JzjXhfgfMOU/s1600/IMG_2135.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL9smTIiDdNgXDaE_du22lHMHo4zb4DyDU_DYtVL_eZlU4YjQzuoFix_X9wDklUxLec53-ES-m5JgYW-cvrup92aI5yNSJW9WclmJoJxmPnEX3p0UaCbaxVpL_JmOXpC26JzjXhfgfMOU/s400/IMG_2135.jpg" width="300" /></a></span><br />
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</span><span style="text-align: justify;">The first thing you realise when you arrive in Portmeirion, is that it isn't a village. Not a real one at least. The approach through narrow country lanes terminates in a landscaped coach-park and a security gate. Portmeirion is an </span><i style="text-align: justify;">attraction</i><span style="text-align: justify;"> principally, and you have to pay to enter unless you are staying in the village itself or in one of the outlying cottages owned by the company.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbp2hmLABgMJpzP3iMNBWaPdIZRHIvap72y9jCM2WV7meBSjScOwnflPpiEKomha2JSysLSAJYDltOk06DNngajngHmEsScvvyOQRsgvZERUQU6j8qWHNP6x7YFO5VYyb8D_dMc_tKTUE/s1600/IMG_2167.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbp2hmLABgMJpzP3iMNBWaPdIZRHIvap72y9jCM2WV7meBSjScOwnflPpiEKomha2JSysLSAJYDltOk06DNngajngHmEsScvvyOQRsgvZERUQU6j8qWHNP6x7YFO5VYyb8D_dMc_tKTUE/s320/IMG_2167.jpg" width="240" /></a><br />
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Surveying the entrance gate are two dinky little classical pavilions which were the last buildings designed in Portmeirion by Clough Willians-Ellis, the village's bizarre, aristocratic founder. Williams-Ellis was a successful if off-beat twentieth century architect specialising in traditional, mostly neo-Georgian designs. His long-cherished aim of designing a kind of architectural Shangri-La, came to fruition on a remote part of the Welsh coast, just a few miles from his ancestral home. He began it in the 1920's and made these, his last contribution, in the mid '70's. It sets the scene for the mix of surreal scale games, 'straight' Georgian pastiche, ad-hoc reconstruction and picturesque whimsy that defines the rest of Clough's entirely self-invented mock-village.</div>
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.<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8d_R7cMwPFHeQ1mgBTRtL7a-iUFwf2kjR2c_ooV_p3iuYipYpouUy9AkKYaneOZ9xHUFpdX1mtOGq0hA89hpfnCiiTyIBiAxfw-90pg9Gc8zn9Icd-Cj5dJO_-4Apn2PEHdzF4jl8Zsw/s1600/IMG_2207.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8d_R7cMwPFHeQ1mgBTRtL7a-iUFwf2kjR2c_ooV_p3iuYipYpouUy9AkKYaneOZ9xHUFpdX1mtOGq0hA89hpfnCiiTyIBiAxfw-90pg9Gc8zn9Icd-Cj5dJO_-4Apn2PEHdzF4jl8Zsw/s320/IMG_2207.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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Once disembarked from your coach or car and divested of cash, you are free to walk your way into Portmeirion. Two deceptively tall tower-like houses extend over the entrance drive to form gateways in. One is vaguely Gothic in character and the other - which dominates views from the rest of the village - employs a lightweight Regency-classicism. Both are actually much smaller than they first appear and employ a two-thirds scale device that is initially highly disorientating. Perhaps, the most interesting thing about them though is the way they seem to grow out of the rock on which they sit, enrolling its authentic ruggedness within their fondant-fancy aesthetic. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8jhDlUb1e9YhqnGkYeUwLIjBPvjPagbUYogXTrG9rP9qgLCIyW_jXf_LEeGZHp1ZbXmPmLlUHj2yJysn23-5By-xkABly66Rj5TpBGQve_wnr-G5zRDkolwW_K96HOwyBcjpMVws570k/s1600/IMG_2137.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8jhDlUb1e9YhqnGkYeUwLIjBPvjPagbUYogXTrG9rP9qgLCIyW_jXf_LEeGZHp1ZbXmPmLlUHj2yJysn23-5By-xkABly66Rj5TpBGQve_wnr-G5zRDkolwW_K96HOwyBcjpMVws570k/s320/IMG_2137.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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The scale games are repeated throughout Portmeirion. Attic storey windows are invariably false and the eye slowly gets used to the fact that all the houses are actually titchy, chalet scale dwellings. Having stayed in two of the ones within the village, I can say that the game of classical illusion is almost entirely confined to the exterior. Inside they are generally cheap'n'cheerful self-catering cottages.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaii5Ie42HuIZOW1Id5eQJfrs0td7yxIGg7e8zvJrijXS3qVRiiRGJAe35bQ9kEpoSRzyORNz1aiOWvxmmUclTznh7ai3Xq_sYYdr8ka3j1HECM1dbEUe8h31P_OAbhEEphSf8SApfJzQ/s1600/IMG_2157.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaii5Ie42HuIZOW1Id5eQJfrs0td7yxIGg7e8zvJrijXS3qVRiiRGJAe35bQ9kEpoSRzyORNz1aiOWvxmmUclTznh7ai3Xq_sYYdr8ka3j1HECM1dbEUe8h31P_OAbhEEphSf8SApfJzQ/s320/IMG_2157.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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The scale is in fact largely consistent within the village, meaning that like a model-railway, the only real disjunction is the presence of real people.</div>
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It has to be said that Portmeirion is also pretty shonkily built in places. Given the heavy rainfall in this part of Wales I was surprised that some of it hadn't been washed away entirely. There's a lot of roofing felt involved and the jauntily painted render looks like it needs pretty regular maintenance. Endearingly, Williams-Ellis was under few illusions about the authenticity of his creation. His description of the village in his enjoyably peculiar book Portmeirion: Its Form and Meaning, is exaggeratedly self-deprecating. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWRCouSKB-fb9vc0rAYJeQ1wt9tw-BnPZ4Ci9lHBQ6olcNk6pMzAPSFcb6Gqb5KVVqmLJAzFTQht4UR3FsvMust7L4_yJynyWd7MVLDAnv0xzkIBzJAT1M28Q7DcV6oi9HTCZkYws5koQ/s1600/IMG_2183.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWRCouSKB-fb9vc0rAYJeQ1wt9tw-BnPZ4Ci9lHBQ6olcNk6pMzAPSFcb6Gqb5KVVqmLJAzFTQht4UR3FsvMust7L4_yJynyWd7MVLDAnv0xzkIBzJAT1M28Q7DcV6oi9HTCZkYws5koQ/s320/IMG_2183.jpg" width="240" /></a><br />
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He invented the term 'Cloughing-up' to describe his habit of taking bits of existing buildings and embellishing them with improvements and add-ons. You could equally describe this technique as cut'n'shut (clough'n'shut?) after the tactic of chopping up stolen cars and reassembling them to avoid identification. It's also a disappointingly underused approach in architecture, except by happy (or unhappy) accident. Here, a 'genuine' classical portico has been re-used as a gateway to the village's central square, stitched onto a garden wall and with a regency style door ingloriously appended to its rear. </div>
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Occasionally, the cheapness of the means leads to an even more jolting shift in expectation. This jousting tent-like object turned out to be a crinkly-tin shelter for a miniature train that wanders around the forest on the edge of Portmeirion. Swags and trompe l'oeil effects were painted on corrugated iron in a way that was like an odd bit of stage-set that had gone astray from a production of Alice in Wonderland.<br />
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This object slightly fascinated me in fact, with its melancholic air of decay and oddly prosaic function. It reminded me too of that late 1960's taste for Edwardian whimsy familiar from Sergeant Pepper or the cover of Pink Floyd's Relics. </div>
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Portmerion is a place almost entirely predicated on the idea of 'the view' and a <i>visual</i> sense of organisation. It may emanate from the British picturesque movement, but it also anticipates the experience of 20th century theme parks like Disneyland. It's unsurprising therefore that it became the setting for the 1960's series The Prisoner. It is eminently photogenic because it has been conceived as if the eye were a kind of camera. Objects are placed in order to set up a single carefully composed view, an illusion that entirely breaks down as one walks around. Its fairy-tale cuteness is also faintly sinister too of course. </div>
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This privileging of the visual simultaneously embraced and rejected the role of the camera in our appreciation of landscape. As Clough Williams Ellis wrote: "Despite the cinema and cinerama, there is still, to me, an abiding magic in being able to command at will the whole surrounding landscape to display itself in successive images". For all his discomfort at twentieth century life, Williams-Ellis was an astute pioneer in the industry of mass-tourism and popular entertainment. He may have hated tarmac and bungalows, but he also championed and supported other, less classical versions of the holiday camp such as Butlins with an endearing lack of snobbery and elitism. </div>
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It is as if the place has been roughly drawn from the memory of numerous trips abroad, a woozy dream of holidays past. As well as the Italian hill-town massing of campaniles and church domes, there are whitewashed, vaguely Meditteranean forms, clap-board Kentish houses, west country cottages, gothic castles and a grand Roman archway. The 18th Century upper-class vogue for building miniaturised, ersatz replicas of the landscapes witnessed on numerous European grand tours finds a more popular and kitsch manifestation here. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKu2fnnEel96QhU6XAYGhz7ViCvn17psPFzoZLThcsimrxzFCwZWRMzsBZ7NxIq8yFhMijItTyKQZ1CpaYSo0tqv6j85Is9KjTTKTF9NV-nv6jd4T1Y6i6by5QwTKkFHePSmCR6GgEwc/s1600/IMG_2192.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVKu2fnnEel96QhU6XAYGhz7ViCvn17psPFzoZLThcsimrxzFCwZWRMzsBZ7NxIq8yFhMijItTyKQZ1CpaYSo0tqv6j85Is9KjTTKTF9NV-nv6jd4T1Y6i6by5QwTKkFHePSmCR6GgEwc/s320/IMG_2192.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Portmeirion can be both charming and challengingly tasteless. This strange, almost Memphis-esque paint job adorns the underside of one of the gatehouse building. The little noticeboard advertises wedding getaways and honeymoon stays.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb14mPAYu-W_7VFyQlyIVYXcjcynsrdxvUUl9Laqq49pUILhLuHDO1SA52EDQ2j46cP46MOmT6oIXshlt2DYXRUyQ1fkObBt0EvmxJXa_fLKj9TvKhPcXCLXsab9ySaoJuSNxP9OILjPc/s1600/IMG_2197.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb14mPAYu-W_7VFyQlyIVYXcjcynsrdxvUUl9Laqq49pUILhLuHDO1SA52EDQ2j46cP46MOmT6oIXshlt2DYXRUyQ1fkObBt0EvmxJXa_fLKj9TvKhPcXCLXsab9ySaoJuSNxP9OILjPc/s320/IMG_2197.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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Whilst there I failed to take a photograph of one of my favourite bits of the village - The Dome. This miniature, secular chapel was added due to what Williams-Ellis deemed a "dome deficiency", but it is the odd and somewhat grotesque entrance object that is more interesting. This is in fact a vast Elizabethan fireplace, bought from a country house demolition sale and stuck unceremoniously onto the front. This is one of the rare times that a scale disjunction occurs <i>within</i> the architecture and when the cute illusion becomes something more disorientating.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhCHkOofHQQFTHXQ3qVMonxh1nzAFDYhudMWAT-PvoTFDYTwd0ZReD29Qr7FqSDzM99DZi7eWhUOmh14KD7XvDK5HSH3yjnusqeojocAdceXw42IkxAxVtf0OAk-804yG4TEu9aTLjVXI/s1600/IMG_2138.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhCHkOofHQQFTHXQ3qVMonxh1nzAFDYhudMWAT-PvoTFDYTwd0ZReD29Qr7FqSDzM99DZi7eWhUOmh14KD7XvDK5HSH3yjnusqeojocAdceXw42IkxAxVtf0OAk-804yG4TEu9aTLjVXI/s320/IMG_2138.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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Inside there is very little except for a sweet little cascade of steps and another miniature building - a model inside a model inside a model - that forms a kind of altar piece. Fair enough really, because Willims-Ellis had no religious views and instead worshipped architecture. This is one of the rare interiors worth noting in Portmeirion. Generally, they seem pretty forgetable and - inevitably - rather pokey, with the exception of the fine hotel building which predated Williams-Ellis' ownership. </div>
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Instead he specialised in <i>external</i> rooms, shaping and manipulating the landscape around buildings to provide numerous vantage points, shelters and places to sit. It's easy when wandering Portemeirion to get obsessed by this endless framing of views. Each vista leads to another, an almost endless series of vantage points that climb up and over buildings and promontories. Again, the organisation of the place both represents the memories of past travels and anticipates the construction of new ones.<br />
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The reveals of arches, openings and screens are almost invariably painted in a deep, electric shade of blue. This deliberately serves to emphasises the thinness of the architecture and gives everything a shallow, stage-set quality. In this Portmeirion seems an obvious precursor to the work of Charles Moore, who also used vestigial classical forms realised in a thin, scenographic manner<i>. </i>He was also very good at inserting these forms into complex topographies. The vaguely psychedelic, Edwardian whimsy of a place like Portmeirion must have appealed to Moore's late sixties west coast sensibility.</div>
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As well as using bricolaged, as-found bits of architecture, Williams-Ellis was happy to work with the remains of the garden and grounds which he discovered on the site too. The tunnels of the former lead mine are co-opted into his obsessional composing of views and visual axis. In this case they also direct the view to a tower which also houses a camera obscura, a device which allows for the visual surveying of the whole of the village. </div>
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The shameless pastiche of Portmeirion is almost not worth pointing out. In the flesh it is both more and less convincing than you might think. More because the illusion of an Italian hill town is actually very convincingly played out at the scale of site and landscape. This is one of the real joys of the village, the way that the buildings frame views, dramatise the landscape and grow out of the hillside. This is both artfully achieved and rather downplayed in contrast to the fanfare of the individual buildings.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUe8SB2eOv3F3_xgEOyorX3eyXF8NWtNeAm15_c6ueK3e8Epc4pqVhhFv9FZV8RlpKV5UHvfSRCKr4t6Ol0u5u-1XKzAE9_XlpA2ZHu8EG9DgjLYlk_ScZyRUJBN_XMtsXBiBOAfB62dA/s1600/IMG_2210.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUe8SB2eOv3F3_xgEOyorX3eyXF8NWtNeAm15_c6ueK3e8Epc4pqVhhFv9FZV8RlpKV5UHvfSRCKr4t6Ol0u5u-1XKzAE9_XlpA2ZHu8EG9DgjLYlk_ScZyRUJBN_XMtsXBiBOAfB62dA/s320/IMG_2210.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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Next to the entrance pavilions, as you pass out of Portmeirion, there's this, a half-fake, half-real window that seems to sum up much of the place. The bottom half of the window is painted on and includes a smudged hand print and the slightly ghostly impression of Clough Williams-Ellis' face looking mournfully out, as if trapped within his own slightly cheesy illusion. The half window actually serves an entirely pragmatic function as the building in which it occurs is a public toilet. The painted on bottom half fulfills Williams-Ellis' desire for Georgian proportions, however nefariously achieved.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixfIQeyZ-ahgDWLy_qyOCDZ-LDSWas8yITP0omlr3ZvejbVLIxYcsc413xfllvmu7TwHqTEG6Ipwo34LCnfX_zdiWVPh3bekZNA3zPzd57-fgBKQjW66_OFaytCXg9KSnRZ2WzkNUEmbM/s1600/IMG_2213.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixfIQeyZ-ahgDWLy_qyOCDZ-LDSWas8yITP0omlr3ZvejbVLIxYcsc413xfllvmu7TwHqTEG6Ipwo34LCnfX_zdiWVPh3bekZNA3zPzd57-fgBKQjW66_OFaytCXg9KSnRZ2WzkNUEmbM/s320/IMG_2213.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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I went to Portmeirion ready to delight in such moments of blatant inauthenticity, but came away rather more fascinated by the things about it that can't be fudged. It's combining of the real and the fake exists not only in literal bits of old buildings re-used, but in the spatial relationships between the buildings. This is both figurative metaphorical <i>and </i>directly physical. The techniques used to heighten appreciation of the artifice - the elevated views and serpentine routes, the exaggeratedly steep steps and escarpments - are an early, un-automated fairground ride. But they are also undeniably part of the repertoire of architecture. It looks most convincing from afar, as you arrive or leave on the train that runs around the estuary on which it lies. Then the pastel coloured towers, domes and houses seem both magical and plausible at the same time. </div>
Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-19513157520091636642012-10-19T21:20:00.001+00:002012-10-19T21:20:20.680+00:00A brief paen to Peter Salter<div style="text-align: justify;">
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I've recently moved flat and therefore have an enormous pile of books sitting in the middle of my living room. Whilst sorting them out into vaguely respectable piles I came across the book pictured above, an extremely dog-eared copy of <i>McDonald and Salter, Buildings and Projects,</i> published by the AA school in the very early 1990's.<br />
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I bought my copy in the second year of architecture school and it followed me around through various, vaguely squalid residences where it acquired its present mangy look. It's fair to say that I loved this book with its seductively heavyweight paper and the strange yellow bull on the cover that reminded me vaguely of Andy Warhol's design for the Velvet Underground's first album.<br />
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During my degree, Peter Salter was my architectural hero. At first it was Aldo Rossi, but Rossi's stripped down austerity was hard to recreate at college, especially if you didn't know what you were doing. Deficiences, either of the technical or artistic kind, tended to show up when the forms were that simple and pared back.<br />
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Salter's drawings by contrast were fabulously complicated, full of idiosyncratic shapes and inexplicable protuberances. I had very little idea what was going on in them even though I spent a great deal of my studying them. Boundaries of inside and outside were obscure, circulation routes opaque and programme more or less indefinable. What they did have was a giddy excess of detail and a strange ability to evoke dilapidated machinery, vegetative forms and ambiguous body parts. They involved spindly and fragmented frameworks which held bulbous, vaguely obscene looking objects, all detailed with an obsessive technical fluidity.</div>
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Salter's drawings alternated between complex technical plans and watercolour perspectives populated by tall naked women and short fat, naked men. I shamelessly copied both styles of presentation for a while, adding my own strange protuberances and naked people for good measure. At the time Salter was a tutor at the AA and I would study the enigmatic lumps of lead and rusty models set in the Po Delta or the Cambridgeshire fens that populated his unit's pages in the school's annual Projects Review.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtJ7x8hv2AI-ULtN6dwl2q-wPHjcLloqLzMYJBIuCupukh3WG6TmAZFfMA2Mx7cr5B9t7GfLuXJyqeNrjmiALSzCzUwb34872cyocn5kHamb3yacSHVbnO3gUhTReomQtf29_1_a_kIJU/s1600/336.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtJ7x8hv2AI-ULtN6dwl2q-wPHjcLloqLzMYJBIuCupukh3WG6TmAZFfMA2Mx7cr5B9t7GfLuXJyqeNrjmiALSzCzUwb34872cyocn5kHamb3yacSHVbnO3gUhTReomQtf29_1_a_kIJU/s320/336.jpeg" width="233" /></a></div>
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Despite its popularity with students then, Salter's work was unplaceable in many ways. It was utterly uncommercial looking but also totally believable in that every component required to build it was drawn in detail. Its dirty realism removed it from the kitsch zoomorphism of someone like Calatrava or the cool shape-ism of Peter Wilson. It was too crafty to be Archigram, too down-to-earth to be Zaha and altogether too nuts for most English architecture.</div>
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Recently I got to see a number of original Peter Salter drawings and I was amazed all over again at the remarkable dexterity and obsessiveness of their draughtsmanship. There were mistakes of course - tiny misalignments where one arc met another, or slight blobs of ink at the end of a line - but these are important too, like the crackles of an old LP. Mostly though there was the half-forgotten pleasure of following the lines as they looped and zig-zagged across the paper, changed thickness and weight or dissolved into dots and dashes.<br />
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For architectural tutors of a certain age, the hand drawing represents both a lost art and a much-missed rite of passage. For those of us reared on battling with sheets of tracing paper and blobby rotring pens, the CAD drawing is suspiciously easy. Mistakes disappear, erased into the ether, rather than becoming part of the drawing's story. Scratched-out lines and occasional rips where the razor blade had finally gone through the paper were testaments to the sheer effort of hand-drawing. Opening up a new document isn't comparable to the mild terror of starting a new drawing. Marking an initial line on some vast expanse of milky-white trace is never quite the same thing as zapping a new Vectorworks 'page' into life.<br />
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Salter is currently designing <a href="http://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/four-houses-by-peter-salter-london-uk/8618670.article">a housing project</a> (for Baylight Properties) in West London. Reassuringly, he remains committed to the hand-drawing, which presumably now someone has to translate into construction documents. The same naked people and bulbous forms appear in the drawings for this scheme, seemingly blissfully unconnected to pragmatic concerns of Lifetime Homes requirements or the number of recycling bins.<br />
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The houses are currently on site too, so they will be the first buildings by Salter in this country. His only other previously completed schemes are in Japan where he built a wood-carving museum, a <a href="http://www.archidose.org/Oct04/100404.html">strange pavilion</a> in the mountains that is covered in snow in the winter and (with former partner Chris Mcdonald) a peculiar, earthy and rotting pavilion in Osaka. Somehow the exotic locations and programmes of these buildings renders them less real, less alarming even, than a group of flats in Notting Hill.<br />
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The strange thing is that, after all those years obsessively looking over Salters's drawings I have genuinely no idea what this building will look like. Looking at the plans (reproduced above) gives little clue. Salter's drawings were always both explicitly literal and almost completely opaque. Everything is rendered with utter deadpan realism apart from what it might look like.<br />
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All of which points to a paradox in Salter's position. His rise to architectural fame came at the height of what used to be known as paper architecture, designs made by people who were primarily theoreticians. Their drawings were never meant to be built, although - as Liebeskind, Zaha and Peter Wilson have shown - they ended up being. Salter - who always wanted to build and whose drawings contained little in the way of visual rhetoric - was the one who stayed in the academy. I'm excited to see that they finally let him out. </div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-89871024468959471242012-10-16T11:58:00.000+00:002012-10-16T11:58:04.547+00:00A Short Piece About Colin Ward
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDyn69WqV2yw8cljde5yx9Y24Qr57UPI4EPnAktrIJEb7LsroaEE4xFZcQw-A3OGPHK9g-gh08NSiu2XoiA47ouPYjfFfjYeU-pfXfWJJCdnfhCPUvK4-1PUVIyylO-CJL35nhhmfgR7g/s1600/hUIe2.tiff" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDyn69WqV2yw8cljde5yx9Y24Qr57UPI4EPnAktrIJEb7LsroaEE4xFZcQw-A3OGPHK9g-gh08NSiu2XoiA47ouPYjfFfjYeU-pfXfWJJCdnfhCPUvK4-1PUVIyylO-CJL35nhhmfgR7g/s320/hUIe2.tiff" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>The following piece about anarchist writer Colin Ward appeared recently in the Architect's Journal. </i></div>
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It’s probably fair to say that current government policy regarding
planning is a hopeless, contradictory mess. Recent policy statements have
veered between so-called ‘muscular localism’ and centralised overriding of
local planning decisions. Commitments to building affordable housing are likely
to be torn up, and there is to be a temporary relaxation of the need for
planning approval of domestic extensions. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I’ve been noting these announcements whilst reading Talking Houses, a
collection of the late Colin Ward’s lectures on planning and the environment.
This has been particularly interesting because there are aspects of planning deregulation
that he might have approved of. Ward was a lifelong anarchist and a sceptic
when it came to any form of centralised power. <o:p></o:p></div>
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His career as a writer spanned the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century, taking in the Local Authority building programme of the 1950’s and
‘60’s and the right-to-buy revolution of the 1980’s. Ward was equally critical
of both approaches. Although he was on the political left, he disagreed with
what he saw as Labour’s embracement of “bureaucratic managerialism”, regarding
at as an infringement of personal liberty. At the same time, he saw through the
Tories’ libertarian cant.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ward argued instead in favour of ‘dweller control’, and the right for
people to construct their own houses. He criticised the legislation that seeks
to limit such activities, suggesting that only a self-built environment would
allow people to live in peaceful co-existence with the land and one another. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The closest model we have to what Ward meant are the ‘Plotland’
developments of southeast England; higgledy-piggledy landscapes of
folk-architecture intermingled
with gardens, allotments and small-holdings.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ward was not without his faults – his rigid scepticism about the role of
the state is questionable – but his thinking seems particularly pertinent when
the government is intent on tearing up the planning rulebook for all the wrong
reasons. Whilst disagreeing with their motives for doing so, it’s worth reading
someone with genuinely radical ideas about how to deliver houses for all.<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-9434276079866105712012-10-16T11:54:00.001+00:002012-10-16T11:54:29.582+00:00Crimes Against Design<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJf34OuRkWt97qxQV_uruOAX7_J8PcBCoemSFfjK-09eG5F__PHxcDBjOJIMTrPXtRBZQ7gbL26CCv8ixleMDGvGWpJ1fk0r8nvzHN1Bdpgyu44LBE1Nord7cH-KtHvzCPhh1JBKHf_is/s1600/2012-08-16+13.05.07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJf34OuRkWt97qxQV_uruOAX7_J8PcBCoemSFfjK-09eG5F__PHxcDBjOJIMTrPXtRBZQ7gbL26CCv8ixleMDGvGWpJ1fk0r8nvzHN1Bdpgyu44LBE1Nord7cH-KtHvzCPhh1JBKHf_is/s320/2012-08-16+13.05.07.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<i>The following short rant appeared originally in Icon (issue 112) and I thought it worth posting up here as it's not appeared on-line before. The photograph is my own and nearly resulted in me being arrested.</i><br />
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Judged alongside their other ‘crimes’, the design of high street banks
would seem to rank pretty low. But my irritation at the state of their interiors
long predates Libor and government bailouts. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I have been going into my local HSBC for something like fifteen years,
during which time it has had numerous ‘facelifts’, each more awful than the
last. Matters are made worse by the fact that this particular branch is housed
in a fine, Edwardian building which has been defaced with polystyrene tiles,
crude strip lighting and clumsy spatial divisions. Hanging a suspended ceiling
below a beautiful, classical dome or driving a cheap partition into some
elegant timber mouldings, may not be a crime in every branch, but no bank is
entirely innocent. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There are common problems. One is the plethora of services and personnel
involved. As well as counter-staff there are people called ‘business advisors’
who lurk inside strange booths or perch on random, primary-coloured stools
offering pre-scripted advice. Then there are various people who merely mill
around the entrance area asking if you need to deposit a cheque or borrow
£50,000. The walls and much of the floor area is taken up with posters and
banners beseeching students to commit to a lifetime of customer loyalty in exchange
for some free headphones. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The essence of all this confusion lies in the fact that banks no longer
quite know what they are offering. Ultimately they would prefer to mutate into
an on-line only service, one where the customer is free to wander around in
virtual confusion with no staff to complain-to. However, they recognise that
people remain bewilderingly old-fashioned when it comes to where they put their
money and cling to the certainties offered by a man behind a counter and a biro
attached with a beaded metal chain.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The endless revamps, with their cheery fonts and cheesy furniture, mask
an underlying confusion at to what a high street banks’ actually for. It’s not
a shop, or an office, or an institution, but a strange hybrid of all three. The
result is a thoroughly dissonant experience combining the remnants of
old-fashioned service with the contemporary hysteria of full-on commercialism.
All this occurs within in an atmosphere of cheap’n’cheerful high street
branding shoehorned into once elegant buildings that now seem like relics from
more confident times. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-48986881987601261512012-10-03T21:57:00.001+00:002012-10-03T21:57:52.684+00:00Electric Edens<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2H1xYKrpJoEz30tARf_jkAy__ByFB5gfG2wZywSjsMfe1iidw-UFMI1stpBgzl3MHsWOwfZ6KSy_e6k-VEw7Hn_rcS37SwKKoPL1h6oODXqvYKm7zN96y_L6Q53EBOlsrP7MhD-iVBg/s1600/LogPlug+Crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2H1xYKrpJoEz30tARf_jkAy__ByFB5gfG2wZywSjsMfe1iidw-UFMI1stpBgzl3MHsWOwfZ6KSy_e6k-VEw7Hn_rcS37SwKKoPL1h6oODXqvYKm7zN96y_L6Q53EBOlsrP7MhD-iVBg/s320/LogPlug+Crop.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">(Image: LogPLug, David Greene. Image sourced from <a href="http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/index.php">here</a>) </span></div>
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So, school term has started and once again I am teaching a diploma studio at UCA, Canterbury. This year's theme revolves around the rural and I am aiming for a kind of super-charged, high-tech, neo-psychedelic vernacular. With a bit or rural brutalism (rutalism?) thrown in. </div>
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Here's the brief. More to follow, on a specially bucolic network themed tumblr site.</div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“As an ideal aspired to over
centuries, the village, traditional or model, cannot suddenly be consigned to
limbo, regarded as an irrelevancy or an ineffective solution to the problems of
modern life.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The final chapter of Gillian Darley’s book Villages of Vision – entitled
No New Villages? – ends with a provocation. What would a modern village look
like? What does it mean to build in the countryside in the early 21<sup>st</sup>
century, with all the cultural, economic and ecological issues associated with
it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Following last year’s foray into Ruburbia – the rural edge of suburbia –
the studio will venture out into the countryside proper. The focus will be on
the design of new rural settlements. We will look at the economic, social and
ecological issues facing rural communities and explore the symbolic and
cultural associations of the countryside. In doing so we will focus on the role
of modernity within rural life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Modernity is intimately bound up with the processes of industrialisation
and urbanisation. What place does it have outside the city? Is modernity
inimical to rural life, which values tradition and heritage? Is it possible to be modern and rural
at the same time? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The lure of the bucolic is a recurring theme within architecture, a form
of anti-modernity that runs from the Arts and Crafts through the garden city
movement and onto the work of Archigram and beyond. David Green's prediction of a globalised, network culture suggests an ability for us to live anywhere, no longer tied to the city. Whilst a beatific rural
life is seen as an antidote to the problems of urbanisation, it also raises
questions about sustainability, technology, land use and infrastructure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This research will form the background to proposals for new rural
settlements and specific design proposals within them. The first semester will
involve research into modern village forms along with design, film and
video-based projects. During the second semester 4<sup>th</sup> year students
will focus on civic/public buildings within rural settlements whilst 5<sup>th</sup>
year and MA students will have a wider remit to develop the topic into
individual thesis projects.</span><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue Light"; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY2H1xYKrpJoEz30tARf_jkAy__ByFB5gfG2wZywSjsMfe1iidw-UFMI1stpBgzl3MHsWOwfZ6KSy_e6k-VEw7Hn_rcS37SwKKoPL1h6oODXqvYKm7zN96y_L6Q53EBOlsrP7MhD-iVBg/s1600/LogPlug+Crop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>
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Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-66303535816736864492012-08-09T08:20:00.001+00:002012-08-09T08:20:35.545+00:00In search of the bucolic<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiylxcpshBfpL8ZpymtWKtkXsPONsFEk5D6Za7-vt0xXyYA0luV1q9v4-hE02XYWtmY_wU7RZW4e3qKT4VMTBkoKThGFITo2PBgCm3DVenMl_lq0gwGzf4gSEv5iOfeotVQuoT6lyYbR-g/s1600/imgres.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiylxcpshBfpL8ZpymtWKtkXsPONsFEk5D6Za7-vt0xXyYA0luV1q9v4-hE02XYWtmY_wU7RZW4e3qKT4VMTBkoKThGFITo2PBgCm3DVenMl_lq0gwGzf4gSEv5iOfeotVQuoT6lyYbR-g/s1600/imgres.jpeg" /></a></div>
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Another plug, this time for an exhibition organised by the artist and photographer <a href="http://www.andrewcross.co.uk/">Andrew Cross</a>. <a href="http://abucolicfrolic.com/">A Bucolic Frolic</a>: Distractions from the Modern "<i>takes a look at tendencies in English art, design and music which indicate a refusal to accept an inevitable onslaught of economic and technological modernity". </i></div>
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This is of particular interest to me at the moment as I'm hoping that next year's teaching studio will be looking at the idea of the rural, and the role or place of modernism within it. It also gives me an excuse to post up a picture by Roger Dean - who features in the exhibition - something I've been meaning to do for a while. Dean's beyond-the-pale sci-fi utopian fantasies are interesting not only for a kind of kitscher-than-thou cheesinesss but for a more unsettling combination of technological utopianism and rural romanticism, two things its almost impossible to imagine co-existing today.</div>
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While we're about the relationship of ruralism and modernity, here's a second link to an interesting exhibition/event curated by Postworks, a collaborative practice involving architect Matthew Butcher and artist Melissa Appleton. <a href="http://www.writtlecalling.co.uk/">Writtle Calling</a> takes the form of a temporary radio station broadcasting from Writtle in the Essex countryside, home to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marconi_Company">Marconi</a> and the first regular radio broadcast. </div>Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3795208825742635713.post-91212999868349258302012-08-08T09:39:00.000+00:002012-08-08T09:44:03.469+00:00Self-Build<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiURjCFGX8_r50-Pq9JQ0lXUIX5POHSqgNwz0SBTwUoNeaoERohJe9bIwzgAs8OB4KVOy16NLnF8pilNfgSOycF6xrXtrw8BZdFfqw1TbEZFwUcahM8GhykGV57RJRRX2pzQtlz39Ou9lA/s1600/Addington+Page+7+addington+parade1500x420.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiURjCFGX8_r50-Pq9JQ0lXUIX5POHSqgNwz0SBTwUoNeaoERohJe9bIwzgAs8OB4KVOy16NLnF8pilNfgSOycF6xrXtrw8BZdFfqw1TbEZFwUcahM8GhykGV57RJRRX2pzQtlz39Ou9lA/s320/Addington+Page+7+addington+parade1500x420.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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A couple of quick links to things I've written elesewhere, and a plug.</div>
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Firstly, my piece about speedboats which somewhat outrageously involved a trip to a boat yard and a sea trial in northern Italy is online at <a href="http://www.iconeye.com/news/design-%7C-latest-stories/riva-boats-showboating">Iconeye</a>. </div>
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The Architecture and Infrastructure issue of AR Australia is also out which includes an essay by me about <a href="http://www.australiandesignreview.com/magazines">electricity pylons</a>. I have another piece in the upcoming issue of AR looking at retro-fitting office blocks in south London for residential and other uses.</div>
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Finally on the link front, my review of the Shard is in the <a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/magazine/">latest issue of Domus</a>. Also in Domus this month is an excellent piece by <a href="http://www.justinmcguirk.com/">Justin McGuirk</a> on <a href="http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/unreal-estate/">London's housing crisis</a> (see previous posts ad nauseum). </div>
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Finally, finally, a quick plug for <a href="http://ucreative.ac.uk/news/2012/august/eco-design-competition#.UCIy42lWpIp">Jeffrey Adjei</a>, one of my students from last year's UCA Canterbury diploma studio, who won the <a href="http://adaptablefutures.com/competition%20results/">Adaptable Futures</a> international design competition. His project explored recent planning legislation such as the community right to build, village green status and neighbourhood plans to propose a kind of self-build civic architecture for New Addington, in Croydon.<br />
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The image at the top of the post is one of two remarkable panoramic views of the process drawn by Jeffrey to illustrate the project. </div>Charles Hollandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08749776401395551607noreply@blogger.com0