Sorbus Aucuparius

Volume-Building Gone Crazy

2011-12-08T23:13:00.001Z

I tells ya ...

Winner: Sorbus Extension Name of the Year

Some very fine drawings (and some by me, too)

2011-12-08T12:38:00.003Z

I'm sure many of you will be familiar with the Pamphlet Architecture series of books. If you aren't, you ought to be - edited by Steven Holl, they give a thoughtful architect space to lay out a particular project or sensibility in a highly personalised object. Favourites include Lebbeus Wood's and Cathcart, Fantauzzi and van Eslander's, and Holl's Edge of a City is ... ah, you know what, there are a score of brilliant little books in the series. Compendia are available on Amazon for not-a-vast-amount-a-money.

Largely, they are platforms for the description of the author's creative projects, sometimes built, sometimes not. The better ones, however, are projective only in the sense that they are analytical. And the best of these concerns itself not only with existing buildings (how dull!) but very old existing buildings (how quaint!). I will freely admit to purchasing it solely on the strength of its title. This is no.20, Mary-Ann Ray's Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice and Midgets.

The series often seriously tailors the book to suit the style of the work. In this case, the whole thing bar the cover is black and white. The idea is that it's like a traveller's guide to each of the buildings described, complete with (maddeningly small) scrapbook-like images from wider research. It's very structuralist, ordered. Set entirely in Italy, each room or building has a four-part description - historical background; site and situation; structure and construction; spatial composition.

I'm going to look closer at one of the seven buildings, the Well of St Patrick, at Orvieto. It's a simple functional building, a helical stairwell that loops back up without crossing itself so that beasts of burden never had to cross paths or turn around.

Each of the analytical propositions is explored with drawings. There are two types. One is photo-collage, the other meticulous rotring pen line drawings (can you see why I like it so much yet?). The former will use a formal connection between camera placement and photo arrangement on the page.Here, one image combines multiple angles from one position to convey the momentary impression; the next flattens dozens of shots from different windows looking across the central space to build what amounts to an elevation, yet because of the origin of the images it charts the journey down and up.

M. A. Ray, Orvieto, photocollage

The line drawings are just breathtaking. They have an austere beauty at a glance, certainly. Their real elegance, though, is the way in which they project a mode of thinking, and a series of thoughts, onto a relatively small canvas. I say relative because, having attempted to make my own versions of places I've visited, I know how bloody big the original drawings are; at least A0, all drawn and hatched by hand with a fine isographic pen.

At a time when orthographic drawings are going out of fashion as cutting-edge conceptual design tools (I know architects use them every day still and will for the foreseeable, but you know what I mean - I mean the mainstream theoretical/design debates), it's a delight to be reminded how powerful a section and a plan can be as a tool for seeing and explaining a richer idea of a space than you might get even with a photorealistically rendered 3d model.

M. A. Ray, Orvieto, plan & section

In this drawing, a notion about two possible readings of the volumes are shown by shading, a vertical line imposed down the centre of the page to divide them. The full force of the journey can be both grasped and explained by these drawings, "the plan ... flat and emblematic as a rubber-stamp graphic, the section gives way to a complex spatial labyrinth". I can forgive the lexical formality [there's hints of Patrick Schumacher's 'repeating vertical planar elements' in the plan's alleged 'two superimposed, independent and non-communicating stepped helical ramps'] because the point is to draw the parallels between the precise physical configurations and the non-precise, perceptual experience of the place. Language exaggeratedly appropriate to its task to draw attention to that task. The orthography is covered with little ideograms and notes, which form the basis of the texts.

It's an incredibly important thing, to be able to pull out the significantly spatial out of the soup of perceptions. What is it about a city, a site, a building that you want to emphasize, to tease out, to privilege? When I visited Naples, with the long-term task of siting a project there, this question became paramount. Naples is mental; there's so much going on. I did a lot of work reflecting on what had got prioritised both at the time and subsequently, and on what might be fertile ground for approaching the eventual site, at Herculaneum. I'm going to try to show how basic plans and sections, when used analytically, can give confidence to simple moves. The first of the two drawings I want to introduce includes a location regular readers will know: the Castello Aragonese just off Ischia, famous for its rosemary and its Nostalgia-esque mad old gardeners.

As the setting-off point for a series of observations about how you approach a condition of dug-out-ness, a section has a diagrammatic quality that no other drawing type will surpass.

R. A. Sloss, Ischia-Ercolano

It's a really simple conceit: the lower half of the drawing has a corner of Herculaneum up to the wall formed by the archaeological cut at the ancient coast; above it, the Castello Aragonese's tufa is hollowed out to form the church by Vignola. The two halves of the drawing share a scale and a ground datum - the latter important at Ischia to see quite how high the Castello's rock is, and at Herculaneum to show how much the sea level has changed since 79AD.

The idea of drawing-as-conceit is one that can be refined to a pretty high level of formal esotericism. Take one convention - the North arrow - and switch its normal position to one determined by a conceptual variable - the buried coast of 79AD, the year of Vesuvius's fatal eruption.

R. A. Sloss,Three Sides of a Line

This datum is real inasmuch as it is the extent of the excavations and marked by a 20m deep cut through the solidified lava and conceptual inasmuch as this dead coastline only remains as a layer of fused sand hidden under two millenia of soil. The act of placing it axially on the page makes it the subject of the drawing; in doing so, the 'attitude' of the key buildings along it are brought into focus. The Roman buildings sit on one side, looking up at the build-up of land they've been cut out of. What does it suggest? That there might be an elegance to mirroring these ruins along the axis of the terminal beach. From this platform, the smaller-scale architectural tricks of approach and materials, of procession and drama, are (relatively) easy to employ - their mother-idea in place, they simply have to augment it.

Daunting Entranceways

2011-12-07T13:00:00.000Z

The barbed wire; the brick, the string; the decay and dilapidation; even the door number ...

De Mare at the Sea

2011-12-07T12:30:00.002Z

Esteemed fellow scriboitis-sufferer Mr Parsons recently visited the new Jerwood gallery in Hastings by HAT Architects. Sounds like a really nice project, interview with the architects here (shame about the Photoshop work).

Being chained to the oven and the hob, I don't get out much these days, certainly not as far as the sea. So I'll just add a bit of gloss by way of history.

The formal and ambient feel of the new gallery are sensitively (and from the drawings, at least, with a pleasing obviousness) derived from the famous net stores that cluster around the beach. Hastings doesn't have a harbour, and never has. Instead, the morning haul - mackerel, herring - is taken directly up onto the shingle. On a crowded waterfront, storage space was limited to plots of 8x8ft. Architectural Darwinism ensued; now we have the tall towers built in tarred boat timbers. It's a pretty nice example of this process; I wonder if the brute economic logic is one of the reasons buildings like this stick in the imagination and remain popular: think of Venice's canals or the fetishisation of 'architecture without architects' purveyed by the likes of Bernard Rudofsky and Paul Oliver. Does the fact that the processes shaping the forms feel almost-subconsciously graspable make them hit you somewhere closer to your gut than your head?

These particular towers were immortalised mainly by the photo above, one of a series taken in 1956 by Eric de Mare. De Mare died ten years ago at the ripe old age of 92. A friend of Rayner Banham, he was heavily involved in democratising the machine aesthetic. He also had a Betjeman-esque fascination with a particular quality of Britishness that managed to be nostalgic but not conservative.

Links:

The RIBA's last exhibition of his work, as a blog

The RIBA library has a collection of prints, if you can bear to deal with the staff for long enough to get them from storage.

Riot!

2011-11-29T22:26:00.001Z

I started writing this a few years ago, and I wished I'd dug it out a few months ago, when it would have been really topical.

I was having a bit of a moment about gated communities. It's when they blur into the half-distance, leaving exposed a clear sight of the cold, shrivelled and blackened hearts of the sad little people that make them, barely human in their miserliness. But that, you knew already.

The Urban Renaissance is a capitalist venture, and an expensive one. The potential to make shedloads of money from speculative building is offset by the huge investment needed to put up the beasts in the first place. It occurred to me then, however, that regeneration is not just an apolitical and amoral financial venture in the beautifully clean neo-liberal mode, but a vastly more sophisticated version of Haussman's Parisian boulevards, straight and wide to allow the whiff of grapeshot to pass cleanly into the mob. Owen Hatherley pointed out how those marooned bergs, the designer ghettoes arriving like so many already-dead ships, are the recent decade's version of the system-built blocks of the '60s. One can see his point: both have been built at such a volume to become a fabric rather than isolated examples; but many are not "meaner and cheaper", or at least not cheaper; many are 'high-spec' and at least in name are 'luxury'. What has been built on Britain's brownfields are not slums or technically even ghettoes. That rhetorical device, the 'designer ghetto', merely draws attention to the real insidiousness of the regeneration mission: not the class warfare of a particularly unsubtle kind, though undoubtedly this is the case. It is the draining of the potential to protest from our cities. It is a war conducted on a double front, both social and physical.

It's long been established that regenerative programmes are brutally efficient means of social reconfiguring of cities. Rumours of arson attacks surrounded the Upper Street renewals in the 90s and the Dalston developments more recently. What is less clear is the way the change to the fabric of the city reinforces these changes. Often, under the 'renewal' banner, all it amounts to is repossessions a lick of (dark grey) paint and a quadrupling of the price of baked goods. It's when the new buildings go up that developers show their hands. They're expensive, big; the effects they engender are hard to ascertain at first.

I'm not nostalgic for 'the way things were'. Most of us have lived in and explored a large enough variety of places to know that many configurations have housed forms of iniquity at some point. It is thus that we also know certain factors that tend towards particular forms of imbalance, and can point to them quickly in the arising circumstances.

Since the rioting in the summer, there have been a lot of opinions offered on the likely causes. I'd like to see mapping of the poverty in the afflicted areas - which can be found here, where the correlation is fairly clear - with the rate of volume housebuilding over the last twenty years. A mapping of the typologies of housing, the urban topography, with the incidents of public disorder. Crucially, I think the information ought to include the expected or actual income relative the the national mean of the first and also the current inhabitants. A Booth map for the 21st century, complete with construction dates. My hunch is that areas where there's been wholesale 'regeneration' won't have suffered as much from civil disorder as those only partially regenerated. Dalston, where there has been a fair amount of regenerative building, was heavily hit by rioting. Although the influx of moustachioed youngsters hints at more affluent times, recent changes are a veneer over what is still a very similar place to the one I grew up in. My hunch is that the demographic changes will have been skewed a fair bit by the recession, as much of the new housing has been completed in the last four years. It would be interesting to see data on how this has actually panned out.

Schoooooom

2010-05-14T13:55:00.000+01:00

It may surprise some of you to learn that my favourite architect is Patrick Schumacher. But it is true.

This is why:

"Parametricism", Schumi says, "is able to deliver all the components for a high-performance contemporary life process".

The full text is here. It's wonderful.

Chorizo Pancakes, Onion Marmalade

2009-12-31T13:32:00.001Z

A starter. To be served on a warm plate, preferably blue. The portions are for two; scale up for more.

For the pancakes:
100g cooking chorizo
150g plain white flour
50g ground almonds
0.25 tsp baking powder
0.25 tsp baking soda
1.5g fast-action dried yeast
1 tsp clear honey
1 dried nora pepper
0.5 tsp black pepper, ground
water, warmed

For the marmalade:
4 shallots
1 tsp sherry vinegar
1 tbsp sherry
0.25 tsp salt
2 tbsp olive oil
water, warmed

To serve:
Yoghurt, fat content > 4%
Salted capers, salt brushed off
50g fine aged chorizo
2 spring onions, diced
Long chile peppers, split in half lengthways

Soak the nora in recently boiled water for at least 45 minutes beforehand.

Mix the yeast with the flour and add enough warm water to form a paste. Leave for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, quarter the shallots and slice finely. Cook in a small pan at a low-medium heat in the olive oil until translucent. Do not allow to brown. Drain off the excess oil and reserve, pour the vinegar, the sherry, salt and a small amount of warm water in and allow to reduce. Continue adding water and reducing until the onions take on the consistency of English marmalade.

Chop the capers and mix into the yoghurt.

To the yeast/flour mix add the chorizo and the nora, finely chopped, and the honey, almonds, baking poweder, soda, pepper, and enough water to form a fairly thick batter, slightly thicker than that for drop-scones. Add a tablespoon of the reserved oil from the marmalade.

Heat a large non-stick pan to a fairly high temperature. First brown the chiles on the outside. Remove from the pan and set aside. Drop the chorizo batter in rounds about 4cm across and 1cm high. They will spread slightly during cooking, and raise back to the original height as the soda takes effect. The mix will make about 6-8 pancakes. While cooking these, heat the marmalade through.

Serve in stacks, held together with the marmalade and topped with a spoon of yoghurt. Scatter chorizo in slices and spring onions over, and top with half a chile.

"Design" - Monovalence

2009-11-12T15:17:00.000Z

In the constant internecine struggle between my love of wooliness, the grasped at but just missed smoky vagueness of ill-defined experiences, and my sheer raging hatred of it, despicable points not grasped, definitions poorly expounded, the latter has triumphed momentarily; unusually, it has done so in support of the former.

The smaller of the two interlocking squares, with a statue of Garibaldi at its centre, overlooks the rolling Umbrian plains and draws the spirit of the countryside into the town. It was conceived as a space, with one corner overlapping the principle center square, the Piazza del Popolo... The towers flank this abstractly defined space and provide vertical forces that hold down the two corner points at the position of greatest intensity of design... The simplicity of this overall design is such that the citizen never loses his feeling of relationship with the city as a design entity while he is participating in his function as a member of the Church or as a member of the political community.
Edmund Bacon, Design of Cities (1967)

I could hold this up as an example of why people shouldn't write about architecture, because of the desultory formalism, the mangling of abstraction and anthropomorphism or the Colin-Rowe-on-dopamine style. There are good reasons not to, however: the anti-Modernist brigade got there first; I believe writing is a hugely important part of designing; and in any case, the above isn't necessarily bad in itself. The problem is that the whole of the rest of the book is like this passage. Writing on building becomes obsolete precisely when it assumes superiority; when certain viewpoints are assumed to not simply take precedence but to deny the possibilities of others. The problem is not that a monovalent way of thinking about design of necessity will produce bad buildings. No, people will always think what they want to think about things, objects, and there's pretty much bugger all you (that's you, the designer) can do about it.

Buildings may be comparable to other artefacts in that they assemble elements into a physical object with a certain form; but they are incomparable in that they also create and order the empty volumes of space resulting from that object into a pattern. It is this ordering of space that is the purpose of building, not the physical object itself.
Bill Hillier, The Social Logic of Space (1989)

Really? We've all tried to justify our projects with arguments like these, as reasoning for concentrating on particular aspects. It's partly a consequence of the adversarial nature of client/critic - designer relationships, where your idea (and not the resulting object) must be better than everyone else's. It is also manifestly only partly-true, a way-of-looking-at-it, partially-convincing and therefore-not-worth-pushing-as-a-theory. The more you try to persuade people that your web of words is the only understanding possible, your discourse weakens in its monovalidity, and the less the words will seem to stick to the very things you are adamant that they describe.

I am in love with approaches that seem counter-intuitive, illogical and vague. These qualities, bound up in language, will always have a fuzzy relationship with the things they purport to describe. It does not necessarily follow that the things themselves will be vague, illogical, strange.

Nostalgia

2009-11-11T17:14:00.004Z

Here's a photo of a man and a woman outside of their respective shops.

NapoliSoup

2009-11-11T16:05:00.006Z

Napoli is a chaotic mix of assorted objects, a medley of chunks floating in an liquid medium of vast time, like a soup, where ideas and objects collide...

The twanging sound you just heard was the above analogy being stretched to breaking point. As we wipe the alphabetti from our faces I'd like another scenario to swim into view. Roll back a week or so. It's autumn, the nights are drawing in (a phrase which brings up several images, none of which have much to do with daylight hours diminishing). DS12 are holed up in a hostel in Naples, waiting for dinner. The shops are closed, but earlier they spilled onto the streets like so many cornucopias, laden with goodies. Castagne, chesnuts, and zucca, squash, are what I'm after.

Photo courtesy K. Alexander

Having purchased a large pumpkin and a kilo of chesnuts, I got back and switched the oven on. Chesnuts are a minor bugger to prepare, but it will be worth it. Slit the casings halfway with a sharp knife. Set immersed in a bowl of water for an hour. Open a bottle of wine. Then drain the chesnuts and place in the oven with 1cm of water. In the meantime, prepare the squash. Cut into great big chunks. Douse in olive oil and cover in sprigs of rosemary and sprinklings of black pepper.

A short interlude.

Don't buy rosemary. Nice people consider it a pleasant ornamental herb and grow it in their front gardens. This is to your advantage. However, on this occasion, I had just been atop the Castello Aragonese 200m off Ischia, a monastery-fortress built into a natural tower of tufa lurching out of the Mediterranean.

The former monastic gardens are tended by a cranky old man, who started following us around (which was useful, because we'd lost the alsatian previously dogging our steps). He was grandiloquent in his oratory, speaking only Italian. Even the realisation that I understood roughly nothing of what he said had very little effect on the effusiveness of his discourse. He did, however, get sufficiently slowed down by the arduous terrain for me to pocket a significant portion of his aromatic bushes, which were to find their way into the gargantuan hostel oven in the evening.

If you cannot obtain magic sea-castle rosemary, Number 98's front yard rosemary will be a fine alternative. They will need to roast with the squash for around 45 minutes, or until the flesh of the squash comes away from the skin easily, and squashily, with a spoon, when they should be removed and set aside. Watch the chesnuts. They may start to rip apart. This means they are ready.

While all that's going on, get a great big pan. Heat a wodge of butter, slow-fry a big onion, and whatever bits of vegetable you've got lying around from: celery, cabbage, carrot, celeriac, etc. but it must begin with a 'c'. When they start to go translucent, 10 mins or so, add the scooped-out flesh of the squash and the chesnuts. Pour in chicken stock and wine in about a 2:1 ratio with the guiding parameters of a total liquid amount not exceeding 3cm above the veg and a maximum wine amount limited by how much of that bottle you've drunk. If there is something wrong with you, you may use vegetable stock. Simmer for 20 minutes. Puree, season to taste, and serve.

Clapton

2009-10-18T00:06:00.004+01:00

I haven't been walking for a while. Until fairly recently it's been too difficult, but as DS12 prepare their trip to Napoli, I've been thinking about it as a method of exploration. Iain Sinclair put forward an idea that writers can be divided between 'pods and peds': those that drive, or are driven; and those that walk. I've always argued that it is in the exploratory pedestrian mode, rather than transportative, that walking is vastly superior to any other means of moving. It is flexible and geographically precise, and, in the cities we have built and are still building for ourselves, fundamentally transgressive. Cyclists merely learn the limits of what's allowed on roads, a thin ribbon of the experience of a city. Automotive travel is entirely circumnavigated with legislation which is essentially mapped out before you get your license. Only on foot can you still test the boundaries of where you, citizen, may go.

Because roads and cars are technological marvels, they are hemmed in by their technology, entirely defined by it. For every closed route, one-way sign and bollarded entry there are countless logistical and safety reasons why a car's path should be limited. On foot the reasons are always a little different: they must be ideological. I was wandering along the canalized Lea river with Wainwright. I'm very fond of the Lea. Some of the other residents are very fond of it too. It seems to mark a semi-threshold between particular conditions, announcing to its Western border the start of an atmosphere of my early childhood: dead pink tower blocks, dry dog shit, crap grass in massive, blank stretches. This looks like it would be happy in East Berlin; the beautifully English inclusion of uPVC individualised house-like entranceways gives its location away.

Yet it is only a semi-threshold, a threshold-once-removed: its similarites to the stretches of the inner Hackney that was (Finsbury Park before the pilates groups, the Wick before Shoreditch ate it) are greater that the differences between it and the rampant infestation of regeneration blighting the Borough. Its real counterpoint, the territory whose distance it flaunts is the already-gentrified Regent's Canal, with its well established loft living gated amenities for aspirant communities of terrified city-haters.

Up until now I've been skirting it, moving around the edge of it without focussing, without a proper hint. And this is what it is like, walking around it, that is, if you can ignore the fifteen foot six-bar electric fence that continues for miles around the Olympic Site. The contrasts are so vast, so stark, that it hurts. Contrasts between the image (pixelated, over-saturated, poorly photoshopped) and the current reality; between that image and the reality you know will be left over once it's all over; between the seemingly massive ambition of the project and the knowledge that the effects will be a matter of accreting small erosions of a whole world: so contrasting that similarities rear up at you like hungry freaks: between those images and a cast of dimly remembered clones from, well it doesn't matter, does it? Between the unnatural blue of the hoarding and the unnatural blue of those computer-generated skies.

You can't get in. This will be old news to those who've been following the Olympics closely, but Wainwright and I were surprised by the extent of the 'security' measures. Perhaps, Hackney being the council that bought the then state-of-the-art licence plate scanners off the Army in Northern Ireland, the borough with more CCTV than any other, we should have expected it.

We didn't go on, doubling back instead into the battleground for the new world, yuppiedromes colliding with badly cemented squatted warehouses, soon to become yuppiedromes. What is startling about the legacy project is its ambition: how anyone would have the gall to gentrify and regenerate Hackney simply astounds me. Yet it is happening.

While I'm very happy to get carried away speculating wildly on walks such as these, I have my doubts about the derive. It makes me uncomfortable though I can't quite put my finger on why. Perhaps it is because I have spent so much time doing it (well before I'd heard of anyone called Debord; perhaps the retrofitting of theory to action adds to the feeling) and the doubt is thus self-doubt - like Prozac, the readily-reached for and most effective form of doubt.

Another layer inscribed on the palimpsest:

If I had to explain to an American how London humour worked I'd show them this photo (along with the earlier shot). The new arrows, disappointingly or appropriately according to taste, did not lead to a marked optimal point to leap from.

Spanish Omelette

2009-10-10T16:27:00.004+01:00

The title is not an overwrought architectural analogy, I'm sorry to disappoint. Instead, it's something that's so good I'd like to share it with you all. It is my love of the tortilla espanola, so deep that it turns my prose purpler than the snot of a sea snail.

I sometimes think that most food cravings, and certainly all favouritism shown to particular delicacies, spring from powerful original experiences, in a sort of more direct form of Proustian recall. Rather than the taste of madeleines dipped in tea triggering the involuntary memory of his entire neurotic childhood, he might have enjoyed himself more if it had triggered the involuntary memory that madeleines are tasty. A.J. Liebling's remark that

...in the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece...

would be incorrect inasmuch that Proust would have been too full to even contemplate writing, though this is to assume that the man would have enjoyed the feast.

But I'm off track, because the memories I want to tell you about are from Spain, not from Combray or even Paris. Because the French omelette is a Proustian thing - quickly, carefully prepared and eaten, yet inspiring rivers of ink to flow in its praise. A Spanish omelette is quite different, much less vaunted but roughly a hundred million times better.

For a series of unrelated and unplanned reasons I've spent a lot of time in Spain, and it is the place which engendered the inner Mr Creosote that has forever since been yearning to get out of my nimbly midnightly fridge-raiding body. Fish, I think, was the first trigger, because to the English child of five or six the notion of eating something served to you with only the guts removed is so alien, so adult and, as he will learn to pronounce, so continental. In a restaurant on Mahon harbour, late at night (another miracle: 9pm was bedtime, yet even in this Northern, Balearic backwater dinner was resolutely later; I was told of a hotter, darker place where gypsies eat after midnight, and to this day Seville remains the most savagely glamorous place I've never been to; but here, with faint lights dancing over an intimidatingly black sea, with awnings gathering wattage into night-rooms and dozens of fish laid out ready for a game of eeny meeny miney no that one, next to it, derecha, yes: and that was break-point, it didn't seem like much but it never does. Once I'd chosen from that piscine morgue and had the same thing brought back to me with its face charred and its eyes weeping crusty retinal fluids over my chips and I'd eaten it, there wasn't much logic in refusing spinach or brown bread. Then there was the deft pedantry of actually taking the thing apart: if you've ever plucked and boned a chicken you'll know that butchery is brutal and messy; by contrast the post-incendiary deconstruction of even a fish as bony as the Cap Roig (or red scorpion, a fish so ugly it'll make your eyes bleed), is a one-way mechanical miracle of lighthanded beauty.

Since this was intended to be a vehicle for giving you a recipe, as requested, this madeleine moment by the sea would seem an appropriate launchpoint for one. But fish is, essentially, easy; this is its joy. The best fish recipe I know goes like this: buy a fish you like, any fish, but make sure it is so fresh it still twitches; heat a grill, preferably one involving charcoal; brush fish with olive oil, grill the fish; eat with chips. Not really much of a recipe, is it?

Nowadays, I spend quite a lot of time sitting in bars, which is the tortilla's natural habitat. As a child, I did less of this, except on the continent - partly because you end up waiting lots when you're not in your hometown, and partly because bars are just better there. Tortilla is the most common barsnack in Spain to the extent that a regulation requiring establishments to have one ready on the counter at all times would require precisely no changes to protocol. In those town squares drably halfway between those of paella westerns and those of Reading which were once cloned prodigiously to fill Spain's regional transport hubs, boredom drove a younger me to crave the yellow wedges at first simply because it was there, and nothing else was. Unlike the similar nowheres in Britain, these dusty, pastel coloured versions actually ate food, rather than consuming it.

Tortilla is the ultimate introduction to Spain, and its ubiquity is a good reason as to why. Navarrese have claimed invention to me, and the barren towns they inhabit epitomise the interchanges, railway stop-offs and coach station vagueness from where tortilla is my only specific memory. But Tortilla is pan-Spanish in a way that a child, overwhelmed by the sheer variety of places that are bracketed under the national conglomeration, can cope with. It is roughly the same from Asturias to Valencia, and goes equally well with beer, Rioja and sherry, adapting acording to taste and ingredients rather than area, always with the same base. I am eating some now; here is the recipe:

As any of you who've tried to get them off me in the past know, quantities are not my strong point. You will probably need 1kg potatoes, half a dozen eggs, one onion and a whole load of oil. That is all.

Buying:
The potatoes, and I can't stress this enough, must be waxy. Any new potatoes will do, and if it's spring you can just scrub the peel off. If it isn't, then choosing larger ones will save you a tedious task.
Onions: you know those massive spanish onions, the ones as big as grapefruit? This is what those are for.

You will need a big saucepan and frying pan, a large plate, a seive for oil and a tupperware or jar to keep said oil.

Method:
Peel the potatoes. Chop the onion into fairly large chunks. In a big, heavy saucepan, heat a glug of oil and keep at a low-medium temperature and when hot, add the onion. Stirring occasionally, chop the potatoes into this slices, about the width of a pound coin. I find the quickest way to do this is to halve them lengthways, then feed into a rapidly swinging knife with a curved blade. Add to the onion, along with about a cup and a half of oil. This should ideally be olive oil, but you an me ain't made a money, so vegetable oil with a dash of olive for flavour will be ok. Cook the potatoes and onions until the potatoes are edible, but not falling apart, about 25 minutes. The oil should just about cover them: fear not; once the frying is done you should drain off the oil and it can be reused for other dishes.
Beat the eggs lightly and add to the potato and onion mixture drained of oil. It's best to let it cool before adding the eggs, in case they start to set. Get a frying pan of a size that will hold the mixture to a depth of about 3-4cm, get it on a medium-high heat. Pour back a spoonful of oil just to lubricate the bottom and then pour in the egg-potato-onion mixture.
Let it cook for about 10 minutes before placing a plate over the pan. Dextrously flip the whole lot so that the tortilla sits upside down on the plate. This is officially only the only tricky bit. Then slide it back into the pan, tucking any recalcitrant pieces under the cooked top. Cook for a further 10 minutes. Give the plate a wipe in the meantime and when done, flip the omelette back out onto it.

Do not eat it. Like a good cake, tortilla is best the next day. Tomorrow lunchtime, you will be glad you waited.

The Tlon Conundrum

2009-09-18T12:37:00.016+01:00

"Ten years ago, any semblance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do otherwise than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men."
Jorge Luis Borges: Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Borges, as guilty of overusing hyphens as I am colons and semicolons: Neil Spiller, in his introduction to the Augmented Landscape collection of Smout Allen projects (see below), announces the "cosseting of the virtual" into architecture; Borges is often credited with predicting the internet and Tlon is the prime exhibit for that prosecution; yet Tlon is about the cosseting the virtual in the real, not simply the creating the virtual. The physical world is 'infiltrated' by Tlon artefacts. Currently, we are truly creating virtual realities. Are we really also creating realities, grafts onto the real, that are in part virtual? Or is that a confused idea, a solipsistic understanding brought on by the pervasiveness of VR terminology?

First off, at the most basic level, ideas do change the world. Doubt that mankind is capable of and currently involved in bending the world in this way is untenable.

The crude example above is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but I'm worried that all this talk of anti-determinism and the failure of architectural concepts implies that I don't believe that ideas of alterations and the alterations themselves correlate at all. Nonsense.

Jaron Lanier, who coined the term virtual reality in the 80s, reckons the seductive world of the digital is a more dangerous thing than we realise. He calls it 'cybernetic totalism', the most extreme version of the idea that everything can be reduced to information. The cybernetic Utopia is probably, in many minds, a bit like the Matrix. Entire worlds constructed (mark you) out of pure information, a map coextensive with terrain, perpetually flowing through its posthuman occupant(s). Rather than face the highly likely circumstance that a world exists outside our minds and is rather concrete indeed, this neo-Idealist vision will simply engineer out the need for it, cycling from one made-up thing to another. Or as Lanier put it, in the maze of the database or programme, we're in danger of "having a tube running from our butts to our mouth to get nutrition". He puts the task of engineering real physical things at the greatest risk of dissipation. Which is funny, because there's such a significant trope of architectural thought that fetishises the coming of the machine (been to the AA recently? Or California in the last 20 years?). While some computer scientists are worrying their profession into stasis architects are siding firmly, and naively, with second-rate science fictionistas and, like Kent Brockman, are announcing that they, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlords. From extremes such as concrete logic gates channelled into Norwegian rock to sinuous algorithmic shapes our world would be rewritten in binary.

The first lesson from the Cybernetic Analogy? That if we are to remake our world as digital, we shall have to fashion ourselves in the same image, this being the corollory of our minds imagined as digital in information theory. This is what occurs in the story of Tlon, by means of a deus ex machina, something some architects should stop believing they have access to.

Second is that Platonism is hard at work beneath the surface of algorithmic design, a parasite from the earliest days of information theory, and it is the single most antithetical ideology to architectural thought. As Borges continued,

The contact and habit of Tlon have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters and not of angels.

The third is one of scale. This is a word I'm keen to give an expanded use to. Architects use it to refer to a particular kind of relationships between objects in the real world, which is, really, all we ever do. We like to think these categories are unbreachable, but they are not. It should be clear that what Smout Allen cosseted in the Geofluidic Landscape was not the virtual, but the temporal, and it is in this realm that our vocabulary is most impoverished. Planning over time, not just in space (a convenient abstraction in the first place), is so rare that even the most tentative attempts seem radical. But introduce it as a different vector of something we know, the radical feel dissipates, and the real work can begin.

Geofluidic Stasis

2009-09-17T13:06:00.006+01:00

It may be asked what my purpose is in discussing biological analogies and responsive/adaptive possibilities for architecture. I'm asking it myself. There's plenty of time to go into the reasons that many other approaches are silly, pointless or just a bit boring, so for now I'd like to carry on refining this notion of what an architecture heading for sentience should be like. I'm going to introduce a few examples, projects that attempt something similar, to narrow down what's feasable, and what's desirable. Two separate streams of thought will emerge, the one digital, reaching its greatest sophistication with contemporary cybernetics; the other analogue and usually biological, again being explored best outside of architecture.

First, a building project. Mark Smout and Laura Allen's Geofluidic Landscape, a large complex for a variety of uses on the Nesodden Peninsula in Norway. A system of shifting and moving components, it seems more similar to the Macdonald and Salter projects of the 80s, particularly Iona, with its layers of appendages that were to be battened down come winter (want a link? off you go, good luck, maybe you'll find a copy of the Building Projects book). I don't pretend to understand the 'paintings' that purport to explain Smout Allen projects, however. The plans are complex enough.

This building "explores the natural cycles and processes that are present in the surrounding landscape and apparent in the ambient and latent qualities of the site... one is introduced to these phenomena with heightened sensitivity by means of tranquil areas such as hot pools, viewpoints and sun-drenched plateas". Which sounds very nice. I'm always a little suspicious of this sort of perceptual determinism, but that's for another day.

In order to control this assemblage, a "computer" (their speechmarks, not mine, pleasingly) of physical switches is cut into the rock, "its inputs, logic gates and outputs become fountains, flows, small pools and jets so that the complex choreography of the landscape, building and fluidic devices perform in a reciprocal although not repetitive sequence".

"A device", Smout says, "is just a more or less complex system... a way of describing a relationship between two known objects". This is certainly true, but the result is the most basic kind of digital computer, simple on/off switches, and it shows how far architects are from conceiving of their work as adaptive. Although all kinds of non-predicted events might occur, the conceptualisation of the building does not account for these (point 5.2 here). They've rejected the idea of conceptual sticky transfer (ie. the designer decides what ideas the building has), which is admirable. But there is no planned potential for the increase of information in the system. Once understood, these series of gates and switches will lose interest value, unable to do anything other than what is specified.

The Geofluidic Landscape raises two important questions. 1. How much of architecture should the control of object relationship possibilities, an ever-increasing system of logic gates, expand into? And 2. will it work? Or will the real world fail to buckle down under the onslaught of canalisation?

Smout Allen images from Pamphlet Architecture 28: Augmented Landscapes: Princeton Architectural Press (New York) 2007

Modification

2009-09-14T20:12:00.064+01:00

Despite the fact that Geordie lasses wear belts for skirts and that the best prostitutes are to be found not in Rome but in Hamburg, there is less sex up north. This is not a provocative statement, but one of fact.

I've got two major trains of thought that I'm refining at the moment: a long standing one (thus far only briefly covered on this blog, but at length about Aldo Rossi here), about why objects and thinking-about-objects are two, more separate, things than we like to admit; the other a more recent one about the passage of that object in time, across many encounters and much thinkings-about. In particular, I would like to piece together in my head a number of rules regarding how these things we create interact over time (a whole world away from the currently-trendy notion of 'interactive' architecture), hence the current focus on evolution. A third focus is perhaps the wish to provide a less flippant alternative to the biological analogising of the likes of R&Sie(n). If anyone knows a worse name for a practice please let me know.

So back to the sex. Slugs, beyond a variable distance from the equator, tend to be hermaphroditic. This means that they produce genetically identical copies of themselves, rather than the southern all mixed up by sex varieties. The genepool is never invigorated by additions, and remains able to cope well with the same set of adversaries, carrying with it the same major defects, pronounced by repetition. Like Geordie women, slugs up north have fewer predators than their southern counterparts and a greater percentage are killed off by non-biological conditions such as rainy winters. Unlike Geordie women, they have adapted to cope by maximising hereditary robustness over adaptability. The evolutionary timescale of the slug is much smaller than that of the northern weather and so the ability to evolve has adapted to suit. Down south, other creatures proliferate, many of whom find slug a juicy delicacy, and are capable of adapting much faster than the weather to changes in slug behaviour.

I've had it pointed out to me that the autarkic-hermaphrodite theory I've just outlined is only theory, and may not pass Popper's falsifiability criterion. It seems to me that it, like all evolutionary theory, is accused of this because the variables are rarely all known before the theories are postulated. In any case, I want to use it as a suggestion for a particular manner of thinking-about-objects-that-are-yet-to-exist, ie. what you're designing.

Consider your building as an organism. No, not shaped like one, but simply as an entity in its own right and not just one facet of your delightfully rich imagination, particularly a facet as banal as the analogy by which you understand the world. Might it be useful to consider it facing a set of scales not linked to dimensions but to time and effect? Might it not begin to make sense on behalf of the building for it to have the potential to react, not just to make you more comfortable but also itself? For large-temporal-scale pressures you might have to design it as you would a Northern slug, ready to face them and where possible repair and even recreate itself anew.

Bee hives are such a system, having evolved intelligent-seeming features through information, adaptation and repetition. Hence, I suppose, the sinister, unthinking implications of the phrase 'hive mind'. There is a wonderfully esoteric book by Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor, which documents and discusses apian obsessions in modernist art. Metaphors are just that, metaphors, and it is often as Marx had it: "what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality". Marx was, of course, right in the main: the banality of much that we have constructed is a direct reflection of the impoverishment of our conception of it; wrong because even if we managed to divorce creative thought from creation, would we be better off? What is a beehive if not a prescriptive fascist citystate? Would we escape the cloying idiocy of mere concepts to find ourselves in the desert of error and recapitulation?

Returning to the southern slugs, what might happen if a whole set of smaller-temporal-scale situations were accounted for? It would become necessary to include a system of responsiveness and adaptability in the design, an underspecified system, which is obviously incompatible with the idea that buildings are creations of and receptacles for concepts. We're then left with a building that has methods of responding to given situations in continuously adapting ways (let's talk about how this might be done another time, eh?). I have two questions now: first, what if it were able to modify or create its own parameters, ie. to 'decide' what it considers information; and then, what kind of variables might it introduce to respond to and influence the human imagination which beholds it?

A morphological analogy

2009-09-13T13:16:00.003+01:00

When one expends an amount of energy denying the validity of other peoples' metaphors, one is faced with a choice. Either, you must adhere to the doctrine that all metaphors are false, or at the least too vague to be useful; or, you must proffer some more apt analogies yourself. I shall take the latter, and give you the following as a partial proposal for understanding the way we might think about the shapes of the things we invent.

Taxonomists have long been fighting a similar battle to people thinking about design processes. And in their woes, we can see a dramatised and heightened mirror of our own. The aim, classification, is aimed in part at the human perception, not at the way things are. As it should be. While we're on the subject of modes of thought rather than the relation of thought to the real, my analogies can be a little careless, and you won't mind. Thus:

Linnaeus and Semper. They've got the whole wide world in their big books of types, subtypes, archetypes, and meta-types. I won't even explain this one, you'd be so bored by the time I'd spelled out the reasoning why this pair of systematisers are akin. Instead, we should talk about the subtle differences made clear by their juxtaposition.

One, Linnaeus, is making categorical approximations of real things driven by natural processes. Semper's Elements, like all gesamtheoren for buildings, categorises real things made by man. It is probably because our precious ideas have little to do with the reasons why whales exist and are more closely related to hippos than any other known mammal that taxa are becoming progressively more rigorously related to real life, while buildings, ideology made flesh, remain, well, unrigorous. This is the reason why taxonomy is an accretive edifice, while architectural theories are small warring 'schools' of opposing thought. Both have their Linnaeuses and Buffons, Ruskins and Albertis, but taxonomy remains focussed on empirical observations like the welter of information garnered from DNA analysis, while the way we usually talk about buildings does not.

Cape Canaveral, which some of you may know I had a bit of fun with a while ago, was once home to the dusky seaside sparrow.

It's a sad story, and many conservationists were outraged that the US Fish and Wildlife Service refused to mate the banded males with another breed of sparrows to perpetuate the species instead letting them die out. Wikipedia is in this case inaccurate, because the birds are have identical DNA to most of the common neighbouring Atlantic seaside sparrows, and as such fully able to cross-breed and are not a separate species at all. They were declared as such in 1990. Were the sparrows to have inter-bred, a hybrid variety would have been born, neither dusky nor common, but somewhere in between. All Atlantic seaside swallows differ genetically from those found in the Gulf of Mexico, but whether they can interbreed is as yet unknown. The very notion of species, genera and the rest of the classification systems we use is a flexible one, adapting to fit the changing genetic world of descent with modification.

Taxonomy is is essence, metaphorical, a tool for understanding the world (exposing the falsity of Ernest Rutherford's splendid assertion that all science is physics or stamp-collecting). Ornithologists, perhaps, have it easy in a particular sense: the dividing line between intent and fact is clear; there is no intent, only fact. And, because it's an alien architecture that's being described, it may be easier to remember the metaphorical nature of our understanding, and thus to strengthen it. Constantly tied to real conditions, chemical similarity and the propensity for interbreeding, the notion of species is a metaphor whose aptness we can continually update. Even its latin root, specere (to see), has lost its more obvious morphological meaning to the tighter conditions above.

It's one thing to understand, and another to propose. In this rather amusing little spat between the RSPB and the Confederation of Forest Industries, human agencies are vying on behalf of their chosen phyla for control of the environmental pressures on evolution. Every acre of non-native forest replaced by heathland will favour some outcomes over others, with a lot of unknowns thrown in that won't get discussed, or planned for. 'Native' plants are those whose introduction did not involve human agency. The burden of responsibility is on us. What do we want? "The right trees in the right places", something our decarbuncled Prince might say of Poundbury.

After the dusky seaside swallow debacle, the US Fish and Wildlife Service altered its stance on the mutability of species and is currently trying to breed the hopelessly incestuous and endangered Florida panther with Texan cougars in the hope of keeping some of their genes going. Their debate has shifted ground to match more closely the empirical effects in the real world. So much of the debate about our habitations and all the other things we design is centred around ideas and not effects, and we are the weaker for it.

On why buildings may be only partially akin to soap bubbles

2009-08-24T21:27:00.003+01:00

“A building is like a soap bubble. The bubble is perfectly harmonious if the breath has been evenly distributed from the inside. The exterior is a result of an interior.”

Beautiful, eh? Force of argument, cadencing, eloquence. The author, Corbu: my purpose; not to discuss that great mess of thought surrounding facade-plan relations, truth-to-volume, an area too often attached to the word ‘organic’ to warrant touching with anything other than a barge-pole. The obverse extreme of Corb’s argument is supposed to be that consideration of the interior should be secondary to the facade or the overall morphology. Both, at various times, have been the dominant way of thinking (from “the plan is the generator”! to “Fuck scale!”), and the defeated viewpoint left crying foul hegemonic unfairness, toys out of pram, here’s a huge ugly building to prove my theory. Like boys waving their willies at each other.

No: there is a tyranny of thought here, but it involves neither of these points of view. Or rather, both: the frankly weird idea that thought processes in design of necessity carry through into the building, and thus to all future interactions with it. Both insist that what they say about their thought process is all that matters about the object itself. Both points of view carry with them this focus, and when they collide, the ‘other side’, the future interactions, are ignored because the correct causal conceptualisation must be found first. It's like arguing whether pissing into your pond is A. daring or B. disgusting while ignoring that fact that C. you've already got a WC, D. it's killed your prize koi carp, and a whole alphabet of other stuff. The tyranny is the establishment of a false dialectic which obscures from view a higher-level alternative to the dialectic itself. The pinhead volumetrics of angel boogie may seem, to our retrospectively enlightened minds, intellectually passé but once upon a time it was a matter of life and prams to Europe’s finest.

Now, it’s usually enough to say people (particularly Very Important People) are wrong, and why. Rather satisfying for us little people. But as you know, I don’t indulge in such frippery. So on to the reasons those suckered into the truth-to-volume trap are thus sucked, and where we go from there.

States (the condition of the Dynamical Object, for all you budding Piercians out there), physical and perhaps temporal in fact, are understood through a metaphorical process of force which cannot be separated from experience through our bodies. They are conceptualised as locations, as bounded regions in space, because proprioceptive spatiality is the most basic and most important of our ways of knowing the world. A change in state is thus a movement from one place to another: the concrete is somewhere between wet and dry; workers of the world, throw off your chains! This is innate across almost all languages and it becomes very easy to mistake metaphor for truth when it only ever represents truth to a greater or lesser degree of success. Corb’s statement is operating under the extension of this metaphor by claiming causal conceptualisation for the putative building itself.

At this point, you’re probably thinking that I’m being a literal dullard and I haven’t noticed the announcement, very clear at the top, ‘this is an analogy to a soap bubble’. I could go into a discussion of why the exterior of soap bubbles are not simply a product of the interior, in that they could equally be seen, the breath being distributed from the outside, as just as much a result of exterior and interior natures combining under a change in pressures. However, I’m going to shift the ground of the argument again, because the problem, and it is real, is that the metaphor has been inappropriately shifted from a process of human cognition to a thing (building) which does not know metaphor.

Figure A

If there is such a thing as a Real building (I don’t know, you might be an Idealist, though why I cannot think) then it operates as a series of revolving, kaleidoscopic Dynamical Objects (fig. A), while what the creator (1) decrees for it and the observer (2) perceive from them are entirely beholden to the object itself, and not on the decree (or, fairly obviously, the perception) of it (fig. B). The exterior is not of necessity the result of the interior.

Figure B

2009-08-22T16:44:00.000+01:00

Bonjour, all. A few posts are in the offing, I promise, concerning embodied metaphors in creative thought and other such fluff.

In the meantime, if you are bored, I've been catching up on Jonathan Meades' oeuvre. Infinitely superior to last year's twee nostalgiafest (although I'll take nostalgia over retro any day), Of Time and The City. I mean, Bruckner?

I'm often told that, living without a telly, I'm missing things. You are all probably right.

Salvagepunk, Ein!

2009-08-01T21:06:00.002+01:00

As corollary to my observations on degree shows, those interested might like to offer their thoughts on the appropriateness of the term 'Salvagepunk' for the vast cornucopia of eerie doom-augurs spilling from the minds of today's graduates.
I take no credit for coinage, that must go to Mr Williams here, which you may wish to scan before continuing.

Because who, other than Mad Max, is going to populate projects such as this or this? (This brings up the concern than Mel Gibson might be the secret paradigmatic client/inhabitant for rather too many young architects.)

For most people, this phenomenon might simply present a seductive image of an expected future, with an accompanying emphasis on analysis its plausibility and likeness-to-the-world. But in proposing intended solutions for the future, architects have a slightly different outlook, with particular interest in desirability and possibility-of-likeness-to-projection (if anyone has some neat phrases to cover the above, much appreciated). Insisting on the ineffectiveness of heroic new forms and often incorporating a pre-delapidarian aesthetic, Salvagepunk is perhaps the most stridently anti-Modern position one could take. It can, in many projects (including the first linked to above), take the closest form possible to architecture-as-criticism.

If it's going to be a game of rearranging the leftovers, I'll posit the projected apogee at the city of Sigil in Planescape. The image is of the Palace of the King of Rags, who (like most denizens) has bricolaged his surroundings into something more in his... idiom. However, the city itself will sometimes rather marvelously re-form itself to align with the mood of its denizens, based on certain abstract principles of morality. This doesn't mean that it necessarily represents these principles, what happens is that the fabric of the city rearranges itself to resemble an admittedly aestheticised version of what might have resulted from decades of the use that springs from such abstract moral changes, without the need for either those decades or anyone to move or design anything. Which the sharper among you will note would render architects useless. What different conception would we need of ourselves if the objects we created were in turn capable of what we currently classify as 'creation'? Inevitably it would, in turn, be linked back to the way they made us perceive the world. Could it be considered to be creating information, or even communicating?

The reason I'm posting this is because I think this question has a significant positive impact on some genuinely interesting directions, rather than modish doomery; for instance, to what Marcos Cruz calls 'Neoplasmatic' design and into which a significant insight can be drawn here. It's a valuable question for these fields because, as you'll notice in a lot of the projects there's still a huge reliance on pre-selected outcome variables, which... I'll post further on this, later.

The Old Man's Game

2009-07-23T20:17:00.000+01:00

That architecture is an old man’s game is said with enough regularity to be called a truism. I believe it to be false, or at best misleading. It could be supposed that would say this, being, at present, a young man. Like mathematics and physics, architecture is furthered by ideas which coalesce in youth. Unlike these other fields, it lacks a structure to display this tendency. This, I think, may well be a good thing, for several reasons.

Some points to clarify:
1. I don’t mean prodigies. Architecture doesn’t do prodigies.

2. I do not mean that architecture is best performed by young men. I only mean that ideas, theories, even ‘styles’ are formed early in the minds even of those who come to build late. Examples of those who have burst onto the scene and then continued to ‘mature’ at a snail’s pace are too obvious, too diverse and too many to be listed comprehensively here. A more revealing line of enquiry would be to ask who, in the history of building, has shown themselves at their most creative, their most intellectually decisive, late in their lives.

3. I do not mean producing decisive buildings. I have no doubts that most architects get better at making buildings as they become more experienced at it (I would never argue that Kahn’s swimming pool was better than the complex at Dhaka). But their driving ideas will not have changed in doing so. With this in mind, who actually changes, who becomes the gifted creator late, not early in life? Philip Johnson springs to mind, attracting epithets such as evergreen, sprightly and youthful to describe a talent applied to massively varying approaches. I’ve always got the impression of Johnson as a man who follows others’ ideas brilliantly. But you’re waiting for me to talk about le Corbusier. All the Plans Voisins, the Citrohans, the Dom-inos, the Unites; then Ronchamps. I’m sure, however, that the Ronchamps obsessions: dramaturgy, iconography, ancient Greek buildings, Cathars; these are all age-old, they were not additions but the core of le Corbusier’s drive. He’s a great polemicist, and he knows when he’s grandstanding on behalf of something necessary, not something he loves. He doesn’t love the Phillips-Pavilion, and Xenakis understood this to be a sign that he was required to take over the master’s creative input. Corb really didn’t want this. He had another vision. Maybe, I don’t really know yet, he did have a Damascene conversion late in life. And perhaps that’s how it works best. He didn’t die a happy man, though, out in the Mediterranean.

Concepts (1)

2009-07-23T20:10:00.000+01:00

Architects create reality through thought, this is undoubtedly a complicated and poorly-understood process resulting in deeply unsatisfying built reality, and explains why thinkers have both contempt for architects and fascination with architecture. The creative process usually boils down to “this aspect of my design is like.. a mushroom/fractal coastline/Rilke poem… in that its services grow through a central stem/structure repeats at different scales/has elements that entwine like lovers”, which becomes the ‘concept’, at which point the standard rules fill in the gaps: drawing conventions, building procedures, catalogue cladding and so on. Lovely buildings may result from this but the process does not encourage it.

There are no successful analogies in the creative process. When I write, as I do before I draw, analogies only carry across clauses falsely, as if to emphasise their status as weak descriptors of a reality only just beginning. In doing this I place great faith on my ability to design: specific sentences communicate practical tasks easily. “The handrails must be made from oak because this is warm and pleasant to the touch” is an easy step to follow, and buildings can be made of successive decisions such as these. “This wall is out of place because it is a plane, when the rest of the building is a system of mass” also lends itself to straightforward interpretation. Systems of logic such as these are constituent parts are essential to a design but they must always fit into an overall rationale to which logic does not apply.

doom at the London degree shows, summer 2009

2009-07-23T09:47:00.000+01:00

Shows always make you think too many things, all at once. You end up forgetting all of them. A thought did surface, though, like an island in the ocean of laser-cut ships - everything's very dark. Full of foreboding. Gloomy.

Exhibits for the prosecution: all over the shop, favourite words dislocation, fragmented, disconnected, de-this, anti-that, from formalist clashes at the AA to uncanny biomorphism at the Bartlett; the RCA's flippant and amusing polemic mock-projects, essentially venomous in their negativity; at the Westminster show, someone pressed 'desaturate' on the lot, which was all about decaying bunkers and depressed clowns anyway; no-one smiling at the Cambridge show; too few people in the drawings.

Crucially, this isn't a recession thing. It's been going on for years. I think it's no bad thing, this concentration on the half-finished, the already-dying, the dystopian. It's a distinct possibility that what we're seeing is not a mood but a sea-change in priorities, perhaps a shift away from this funny preoccupation with 'finished' objects. In any case, what interests me is whether and how, in twenty years' time, we will see this resurface and mature.

Sorbus 1.1

2009-07-22T21:53:00.000+01:00

Welcome to Sorbus Aucuparius, design and ideas dump. During the time that content is in preparation, please visit www.rowansloss.com.
Ro