WorldBin

Incremental Oddity

2012-01-22T15:03:00.000Z

In an unusual take on the Mediterranean tendency to incrementally develop its houses -concrete columns on the roofs of houses, with reinforcement sprouting out of them, is a common site from Nazareth to Corinth- this house spotted from the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem appears to have resolved the endemic regional desire for a 'western style' pitch roof, and the need for things to at least appear tidy, somehow not-of-the-region-where-they-are-actually-located, with the fact that they are still basically building in the region's venerable, ad-hoc tradition. So the pitch roof hovers a good 3metres or so above the current roof, waiting to be turned into bedrooms, looking very precarious on its slender steel columns (considering its weight and being located in a geologically active zone) and perhaps more perversely, totally blocking any sunlight from reaching its two solar-powered water heaters, which can be seen silhouetted underneath it in almost complete darkness. Hot water, or an absurd image of western suburbia refracted through the lens of Jerusalem planning law?

Cycladic Functionalism

2011-09-28T07:21:00.002+01:00

Why shade one door when you can shade two?

Ironclad Bus Stop

2011-08-29T11:27:00.000+01:00

There was a move to jazzier bus stops in the 90s after decades of dominance by the ubiquitous, and quite elegant, prefab shelters all down the country, as well as their queen's hive that is the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station. This is the biggest I have come across from that little flowering of creativity, as well as conveniently being the one that strains the hardest to break the shackles of propriety. I think there was some subtle inspiration from the waves of the sea, and possibly the gentle curves of the seaside dunes...

It is rather strangely sited on a motorway sliproad with no clear way for pedestrians to access it, and while it doesnt provide much for them -if they can make it there- in terms of comfort or convenience, it at least has made damn well sure that it can compete competently with the trucks for visual dominance of the highway.

Lunar Eclipse

2011-08-15T07:09:00.001+01:00

A shot I snapped of the full lunar eclipse this june. I hadn't known about the event, and whilst driving back home together with my parents, got out of the car to stare -agape- at a moon whose light was rapidly disappearing, burning itself out like the phosphorous on the head of a match, and which after a few minutes left behind only an after-image of itself in muddy orange. Like someone had deftly swapped our moon for Mars, an impostor was up there.
Later I sat for the rest of the event in a garden, where for an hour or so I was alone with what sounded like a creche full of terrorized and tortured babies, as the surrounding population of suburban cats wailed in unison at the stranger leering down at them, like its arrival was the memorial of some irreparably painful event. The dogs were at it as well, barking from every direction in regular but overlapping intervals, in warning lest the visitor turn out to intrude on more than their sky.
I didn't look for meaning in it, but I could sympathise with someone experiencing the same thing coming to the conclusion that the facts of barking dogs, whining cats, and a moon disembodied by the spectrum of light refracted by the edge of the earth's atmosphere, somehow didn't add up to the measure of the event's uncanny immensity, because they don't, and it is that unbridgeable deficit between fact and impression, between the strength and strangeness of a moment and the tawdry ineloquence of its posthumous communication, that in vain I guess Im trying to fill with these words, and a photo.

Cheesy Deception in Gruyère

2011-07-07T14:41:00.000+01:00

As a family we love cheese and all things Dairy. Gruyère -pretty little idyllic Swiss-French village that it is- is all about cheese and cream, and merited a minor pilgrimage from where we were staying on lake Geneva up into the alps. We arrived, had fondue, ate bowls of cream with berries, took pictures of the waitresses and tourist shop salespeople dressed up in variations of lederhosen, purchased a couple of keyring-sized swiss cowbells... and unexpectedly stumbled into a typically wild bar designed by Alien (the movie) set designer HR Giger.

Of all the places in the world he could have fallen in love with, he fell in love with picture-postcard, Heimat theme-park Gruyère, deciding that this all-smiling all-dancing hill top tourist mecca was to be the home of his significantly darker, mechanico-biological, violently pornographic, science fiction legacy. There is now a Giger museum near the apex of the village's High Street, and behind some medieval arched windows opposite lurks what looks like a vaulted room housing the museum's bar.

So from a town heavy on the cheese in every respect -from the food, to the camera snapping, to the nauseating cuteness of it all- you step into some full-on stage-set cheese Noir, beginning with the Pelvic-bone-and-spinal-column Umbrella rack.

Through the alien tables, giant swiveling spinal column chairs, spinal column vaulted ceiling, writhing and complaining wall of tiled babies etc etc. There is way too much of every element, with every square centimeter of the place taken up with one or another motif by the artist. Its wonderfully OTT.

It offers itself up to you with all the honesty of a good piece of horror-ride artifice, wearing the contradiction between its quite spectacular visual and lighting effects, and the crapness of the way its materials are all revealed to be light and hollow when you knock on them, very lightly and happily indeed.

It kind of redeemed Gruyere for me, because these cloyingly perfect towns were getting on my nerves a bit. They all seem to be taken-in by their own illusion, seeming to themselves believe the lie they peddle to visitors that they are somehow real and originally swiss, simply by virtue of their physical fabric being old (and usually this is a selective truth anyway, after certain 19C romantic remodelings).

Like St Paul de Vence in the Var, these tourist havens are quite violently pornographic in how they serve up, without context or content, narrative or depth, their limbs and ligaments, streets and facades, which hump away obediently and on cue in the background of family snapshots, smiling inanely like the beautiful old houses that they are, smiling the empty unhappy smile of someone getting fucked for money. This whole sad scenario is perpetuated by the incredible belief that it is precisely in amongst this industry of heritage exploitation, exactly in the middle of this terribly efficient engine of cultural annihilation, precisely in the empty hearts of places like Gruyere, with its "Artisanal" cheese and 15th century houses, devoid of economic independence and local life, that authenticity claims to be located.

And Giger, for me anyway, with his massively over the top interior slap bang in the heart of Authenticland, by virtue of ramping up the ridiculousness of his kitsch noir, acts as the perfect antidote to all the fake earnestness outside. The Giger bar doesn't pretend to be real but asks you to suspend your disbelief and enjoy its silliness and strangeness in a pact of knowing enjoyment; it is illusion. Gruyere and similar villages pretend to be real, and ask you to suspend your critical faculties and spend your euros in specificaly codified ways, in a pact of mutual exploitation; it is deception. The Giger bar brought this scenario out into sudden clarity and relief for me. It gives the truth to Gruyere's lie

Botta Bunker Bank

2011-06-06T06:16:00.000+01:00

A building whose landlord has clearly found a rather joyful way to increase the allure of his (rather plain concrete frame, 1960s) property to lucrative corporate tenants, both as a telecoms mast, and a clear local demonstration of banking's perpetual attraction to all things shiny and conspicuous. It is at the entrance to Kfar-Shmaryahu in the Gush-Dan region of Israel.

Seventeen Flourishes From Baden-Württemberg & Bavaria

2011-06-02T13:53:00.003+01:00

The Town Hall complex in Friedrichshafen, a small town on Lake Constance -the birthplace of the Zeppelin- that I was quite smitten by. The number of ice cream parlours perhaps outnumbered the actual residents of this German summer resort town, which is positively bursting with 1950s cuddly modern, rigorously friendly cuteness.

As well as the Zeppelin Museum, previously the Hafenbanhof (harbour train station), a rather remarkable 1930s survivor...

...this Scharounalike bandstand on the boardwalk, replete with its own extensive list of Rules posted on its walls as to how it should be used in any given situation (the only other time I've come across such directives was an even more Byzantine, publicly posted document in the Jardin des Tuileries)...

...a granite and stainless-steel clad corporate-lobby cum public underpass (leading to a discount superstore in the edge of town)...

...and finally a ridiculously successful piece of playground sculpture (which could teach Zurab Tsereteli a thing or two about how to make kitsch, fun. rather than effing monstrous)...

Near Bregenz and the border with Austria, the Felix Wankel Institute, previously Felix Wankel's (inventor of the wankel rotary engine) private residence, which he later modified to be his laboratory until his death in the late 1970s

View up from under the Organ terrace towards the vast dome in the Rococo Ettal Abbey Chapel.

Sculpted pew-ends in the Chapel.

The 'sunken' Doric columns and entablature in the central courtyard of Stirling & Wilford's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart.

And the gallery's offices at the back of the complex.

Interior of faded, early chinoiserie tapestries in the vast, sprawling Ludwigsburg palace complex just north of Stuttgart.

Perhaps in a nod to German cultural affinities with Russia, and a similar conflicted dependency on Italian artistry, the palace is full of quite muscular, Baroque figures pumping their biceps and displaying bulging quadriceps, flexing their masculinity in defiance of all the swirling pastelles and delicate vegetal gilding of the Rococo ornament around them, a tension similarly played up to great effect by Rastrelli at the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Tselo.

Some original wall fabrics in the palace that retain their vivid dye, but not their material integrity.

The bijoux mirror room.

Above is the only shot I managed to sneak of the interior of Ludwig II's Schloss Herrenchiemsee. One of the several palaces he was building at the time of his death, with this one being the only palace he never intended to actually live in. It was meant to be a replica of the Versaille of Louis XIV, but a replica in the nineteenth Century, openly imaginative creative-license sense of the word, so alot more colourful, quite alot bigger in the dimensions of its rooms, and -quite incredibly- even more overloaded with ornament. It was also not a palace in the sense of a functioning residence of royal business or pleasure, it was instead meant to be a life-size version of a model-in-a-museum, a fully immersive, lifeless, atmospheric artifact from a better time long-gone, in which Ludwig II could contemplate (alone, he hated company) the greatness of the characters, adventures, and acts that filled the period of European absolute monarchy that he apparently pined over as a lost golden age, flushed with gold, but neutered by parliament and chained by Prussia as he was at that point...

Above and below are models of another of his projects, this time a temporary Pompeian theatre for a Wagner festival (he loved Wagner, and even had a vast Wagnerium proposed for Munich -designed by Gottfried Semper no less- that was stymied by some good old 19C NIMBYism) that was to be located in the glass and iron Crystal Palace that he had built on the roof of his Munich Schloss. The Pompeian period was seen not only by Ludwig II, but also by his father Ludwig I, as another golden age to be replicated and creatively re-imagined in royal projects and commissions, although with the added benefit of being a relatively 'new' old paradigm, having only been uncovered in the recent past. Proof enough of the family's interest, beyond this theatre, is the Pompejanum, a "replica" of the house of Castor and Pollux built on a hill with a commanding presence over the town of Aschaffenburg by the said dad.

Luxury in Lausanne

2011-05-28T12:27:00.005+01:00

SANAA have done it. They've managed to produce a piece of pure, unadulterated luxury that looks and feels the very opposite of weighty lucre, in a region that expends such a significant proportion of its creative prowess in attempting to achieve exactly that, in the form of exclusive appendages that pretty much fail universally in embodying anything except their weight in gold, or platinum, or Moon-Dust, or Narwhal tusk...

Few things in our cities are more contentious, fought over, valued and hoarded than space. Few things can have such an immediate and direct effect on our quality of life, on the way we interact with each other in our free time, and indeed how we spend our free time; whether we are forced to huddle alone in our cupboard-homes pursuing solitary pastimes, expend our income on leisure activities that turn our free time into a source of consumptive production, or whether there are places where we can enjoy the pleasure of unprogrammed time enjoyed in our own manner, in a public space, surrounded by other people equally doing nothing, or working hard, as they will, together or alone, but in a contiguous space.

^Above is a short video of my sister-in-law being frogmarched by me around a little portion of the building, but here you can see a better video and some of the official spiel.

Parks are one kind of place that provide those sorts of conditions, being free for all to use how they wish, according to some simple rules of propriety. However, while they are usually full of possibilities for wandering, dozing, and playing sports, they do not provide the shelter or the positive means for engaging in activities of the more contemplative, intellectual sort, that are always so well catered for in the local or national Library.

There are Libraries IN parks (Milan, Buenos Aires), but until now I had not come across a park IN a library. We are all quite inured by now to the impotent visual spectacle of our Dubais, Westfields, Cheesegraters, and the tainted feeling of tawdry exclusivity which they attempt to drown us in, ocular euphemisms for the sinister structural imbalances we know they really embody. Walking into a marble-clad lobby, a shiny new inner-city mall, a vast be-travertined atrium doesn't feel special, does not make me feel good, it just feels frightening, it makes me feel watched, isolated, unwelcome, my behaviour must be correct, else guards appear out of nowhere and escort me and my arse out of there pronto.

Libraries have even stronger codes of behaviour, they just happen to fit my habits and opinions like a glove. Its just that their order of mutual respect, and communal maintenance of the perfect environment for thought and study or drawing and writing, is just so much more meaningful and important than keeping people feeling safe so that they continue spending their money on pointless crap. Parks are more open in the range of behaviours they allow, since they have enough space -groups of people can form islands with enough distance from other islands to not disturb each other with their antics; but they are equally free of any obligation to buy, of any duty to be a functional economic unit, to have a direct purpose for being there. And that is a very valuable, and increasingly rare commodity these days: the ability to spend time in a shared space, outdoors or indoors, in which you are not obliged to be participating in any form of economic exchange; in which you do not have to be there for an explicit purpose; in which your presence is not a means to an end other than your presence itself.

So with the backdrop of libraries closing all over britain like those female ants-with-wings that like to die en-masse every spring, and with new public spaces in London (and elsewhere im sure, but im very provincial) either privately owned and watched over by private security who maintain the right clientele spectrum, or public but designed to discourage loitering through seats that you cant sit properly on (lean-to's), and ledges that you cant lie on, with that backdrop I walked into the Rolex Learning Centre, and it was like someone had dropped me through a wormhole into an impossible alternate reality.

SANAA have always been interested in parks and landscape, in the sense of a field for human interaction and activity, but here they have been allowed to turn the usual logic of building inside out, so that the circulation spaces outstrip the area of programmed space, to be used as occupants wish, wi-fi everywhere, bean-bags strewn throughout, the floor undulating all over the place, and pierced here and there with circular openings that let you look through to the vast grotto underneath. Its full of direct quotes from OMA's 1990 Agadir convention Centre competition entry, and builds on that office's thoughts surrounding the nature of the Library in the 21st century that were developed with the Seattle Public Library project, all pulled together here into the most spatially generous interior I have ever come across. In a way it could be seen as a bit of a No-Stop-City kind of infinitely extendable, totalising nightmare, where the natural and technological have completely converged to turn us into happy self-contained creative nomadic units, but then, in this form I find that much more desirable than having nowhere to go other than a bloody art gallery.

A vast interior landscape (the building's floor area is 37,000sqm), free for anyone to use and enter, to relax on the floor and chat in, attend lectures in, research in, or have dinner and listen to concerts in. A building where so much of the space is devoted to really nothing at all in particular... bean-bags at the ready. It cantilevers and bridges like mad, for no other reason than to simulate nature, stimulate your spatial awareness, and encourage your ability to occupy and enjoy awkward angles (there are lots of tables too). It is white and gray, and as a student of mine pointed out recently -devoid of texture. However that neutrality just brings into focus -almost didactically- the fact that this building provides in luxurious, fecund abundance, the kind of beautifully designed in-between, unprogrammed space, together with freely accessible learning facilities, that are either so etiolated in our cities, or already dying away. Despite all the attempts of new semi-public places like One New Change to appear welcoming, they are simply not, and cannot be by virtue not only of their design (with its nods to public access, viewing deck etc) but of their very raison d'être.

Walking around the Rolex Centre on a quiet afternoon, there was a studious, but relaxed and languid atmosphere. I wanted to stay, I felt welcome, I wanted to make my own corner with book, laptop, sketchbook and cup of tea, somewhere on one of the more out-of-the-way hills, and settle down to do-my-thing. In terms of how the building was experienced (separate to the official blurb and concept, they so often bear no relation to the actual completed building -as in Zaha and Eisenmann's aerial architectures) it brought together the distant sounds, walkers, and clustered picnics of Hampstead Heath with the respectful, sobre collection of concentrating individuals that is my experience of the British Library. Public building for the public, with access to services and public space to work and not work in, the fact that this (aside from the engineering theatrics) felt so totally unusual, luxury, unique, and exclusive (all the words that ring so hollow in adverts for luxury housing developments and boutiques) was, after I left, a deeply depressing thought; that the unusual and singular is no longer that which panders to wealth and exclusion and short-term economic gain, but that which includes, is blind to wealth, and focuses on developing long-term quality of life. As commercial spectacle has long since taken over, this, the undetermined public interior, has become the ultimate in luxury.

But then this building is not really open to just anyone, and it has a very clear, demographically specific economic purpose. It is tucked away, far from the centre of Lausanne on the university campus, where it took us quite a while to find it. It is a university institution first and foremost, a forward thinking and experimental one yes, but of a very specific context that can afford it, and feels safe in the knowledge that its openness is open to a very specific crowd. This building is an armature of the luxury business and bio-tech that the region fosters -it is a place so wealthy and homogenous that it can afford to develop a new place like this, seeing it as a specific investment in the 'intellectual capital' (and this is the international, wealthy demographic who filled the place) that maintains the country's high levels of industrial competitiveness. The feel good factor that I felt there was, like the copiously amenable corporate campuses in Silicon Valley, geared towards the optimisation of productivity of the students and researchers. But it still made me feel good.

Which is good planning. But why not for everyone? If only the state could again realise what certain academic institutions and corporate bodies (and everyone that Im acquainted with) know, namely that humans need more from their environment than to be shuttled from one place to another, constantly producing and consuming and competing and worrying and wanting and trying...

The following are some more images of the interior, which I visited on a sunday afternoon, hence its relative quietness, although there were still substantial amounts of people there, thinly scattered about...
oh, and below is a sort of internal funicular for wheelchairs that navigates one of the steeper areas.

The Doge's Palace In The Winter

2011-05-26T10:44:00.000+01:00

Six Flourishes from Innsbruck

2011-05-18T17:13:00.001+01:00

Plaster ornament on the vault of the Hofkirche, directly above the tomb of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.

The media stands on the slope of the Bergisel ski jump.

Emperor Leopold I in 1667, dressed up to take part in La Galatea, a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses put to music by Pietro Andrea Ziani, as part of a Habsburg courtly Masque.

The roof of the highest stop on the Zaha-designed Nordkettenbahnen funicular railway.

A door in Wilten Basilica.

A painting from Archduke Francis Ferdinand II's Wunderkammer in Schloss Ambras. The Archduke's collection included living human oddities (also depictions of them, as seem here) and fantastical phenomena, as well as items of the inert kind.

Hampstead Handrail

2011-05-18T10:45:00.000+01:00

Arthritis-friendly handrail next to a very Arthritis-unfriendly flight of steps in Flask Walk.

ÜBERBARNS

2011-05-17T10:35:00.001+01:00

Or rather Bavarian Farmsteads (cousins of the more famous Low German Houses) that litter the sub-alpine foothills of southern Bavaria. They are large longitudinal structures that incorporate all the various spatial and architectural requirements of a farm complex, and its related living areas, under one -huge- roof. Some have had additions over time that extend beyond their monolithic basilica form, but the majority retain their fundamental clarity of outline, instead shifting floors, varying facades, and altering the distribution of their internal functions to adapt to changing farm practices, family needs, and in the case of most (it seems), the complete redundancy of the small scale farm itself as a viable economic unit.

The first one here tickled my pickle by the way it artfully incorporates a miniature grain silo of some description into the front facade of the barn and under its eaves, extending the slope of the roof out further on one side than the other, with the projection looking as if it is being held up by a wildly disproportionate column, itself screened at the top by a cute s-profile cut out of the shingled surface. It has a bit of Aldo Rossi massiveness flirting with some Venturi Scott-Brown decorated shedness going on as you walk around it.

Some of these Überbarns look decidedly 1970s, others bear the marks of the changes wreaked by the passing of many generations and their respective tastes, and a couple that I came across are new houses mimicking the type's form, but all were occupied, the ones still being used as functioning farms usually being the ones that most often had significant external additions.

A rather pleasing sight was that so many of the barns used their not insignificant roof-scapes as little solar farms, the degree of popularity for which probably has something to do with Germany's famous subsidising of its solar capacity.

As a total tourist driving through the region -consuming it all superficially with my eyes- the way they drop into the landscape like little villages that have been crushed in a mould, and pressed together into toy-house shapes, was for a kitsch glutton like me the perfect run up to the imploded collection of fairy-tales that was Neuschwanstein, the castle which we were on our way to see as we passed all these Bavarian farmsteads.

One Flourish From Farringdon Road

2011-05-01T19:02:00.001+01:00

The three Barbican towers (Lauderdale, Cromwell and Shakespeare), at sunset seen through the Farringdon Road Crossrail station's construction site.

The Room behind the Sideways Door

2011-05-01T18:40:00.000+01:00

I was allowed through the cat-flap today, to find that there is indeed a room behind... containing nothing but a light and a pair of electric sockets.

Sideways Door

2011-04-06T18:38:00.002+01:00

Human cat-flap at my gym in central London...
I particularly like the way it looks like a full door with its reflection.

Torres Blancas

2011-04-05T11:23:00.000+01:00

I'll try and let the pictures do the talking on this one, an exuberant, next generation Iberian hybridising of the kind of organic concrete expressionism developed by Bertrand Golberg in Marina City in Chicago (finished the year this was designed). The whole thing evolves from dizzyingly complex Aldo-Van-Eyck-on-stimulants plans that govern its massive cliff-like form as it rises.
Between every slab, and into every nook and cranny opened up by the plan's super-imposed circles are crammed small, detailed, strange neo-vernacular wooden details -floating shutters on rails and blown glass screens- which in their hand-crafted, delicate and antiquated appearance (Hassan Fathy in the sky) contrast with the immense coarseness of the concrete structure to lend the whole ensemble the appearance of an ancient future, of an imperial muscularity and grandness aged and colonised by a coral reef of successive, smaller generations whose interventions act only to render the overall scale of the building more impressive.
And now the photos...

The entrance is in the lower ground floor and is a veritable mushroom filled grotto of marble and plaster...

I had wanted to do a post on my other favourite (twin) tower in Madrid, the Torres De Colon, but unfortunately only had time to peer at it through the window of a cab after speeding around a round-about a few times in front of Phillip Johnson's Puerta De Europa towers. The Torres Blancas was just across the road from the Puerta de America hotel (the one where each floor is by a different architect) where we spent a restless night in Plasma Studio's spike-fest floor, in which there was a certain degree of difficulty getting any privacy whilst using the spiky loo or spiky shower, although the terrifying novelty of the whole project (it felt like pure excess capital, like you could touch the stuff with your hands and eyes) made any embarrassment kind of worthwhile.

Japan I Miss You: Kyoto-Matsue-Kobe

2011-03-28T11:12:00.000+01:00

^The vast catalogue of spatial games that is the ludic Kyoto Train Station by Hiroshi Hara, who should have gone on to build the world (also see the best Pomo tower in the world, the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka by him and the Yamato HQ in Tokyo)

I was supposed to be in that world on the other side of the looking glass we call Japan right now, but have put off the trip to another, more appropriate time. Instead ive gone back into my archives and trawled up a few images from my last voyage in 2006 (sadly I seem to have lost my images of Shin Takamatsu's work), during which I had unfortunately been resolved to go nowhere near a camera -to get my sketching skills back up to scratch- but during which I had luckily at a couple of points clearly directed my brother to point and shoot at a few of my favourite moments.

^Double staircases at the back of a building facing the platform in Matsue Train Station

^Arcades under a railway viaduct in downtown Kobe

^The most densely packed block in Kobe. Howl's Moving Castle tethered to the Kansai streets...

^its side

^during the day

^matchbox houses in Kobe

The Original Drapers Gardens (demolished)

2011-03-19T12:14:00.001Z

One of a clutch of post-war, first generation skyscrapers that have either been demolished (122 Leadenhall, 20 Fenchurch Street) or re-clad and redeveloped (Britannic House, London Stock Exchange, & the soon to be reclad Guys Hospital), Drapers Gardens was one of Richard Seifert's many insertions into the London skyline, although along with Centre Point -which was finished one year before this- a particularly graceful one, sporting the same bowed frontage, which here was emphasised with continuous recessed horizontal glazing, tinted a bright green.

Finished in 1967 and standing at 100metres tall, with a pronounced presence on the skyline, up close it still felt like a small building, through a combination of small floor-plates and the way Seifert's office set it back from the street on a plinth, and created an intimate entrance sequence and range of surrounding spaces. Above you can see the rectangular courtyard (replete with cute water feature and overabundant planting) embedded in the two story plinth of offices through which you would approach the base of the tower cantilevering over an entrance in front of you, and to which you would enter from the street via a sottoportego (which you can see just to the left of the planting). To your right were a large set of stairs (from where the photo was taken) that rose with one landing to the roof of the rear of the plinth.

Rather forlorn when I visited, after the building had been vacated for some time, the second floor raised plaza to which the stairs led was a weird no man's land pressed up against the back windows of all the surrounding offices, its uneven paving watched over by several CCTV cameras and ventilation for the spaces below. It was a valiant attempt to create an open space for the tower to stand within and be admired from, but was made far more interesting, and far stranger than a successful tabula rasa through its compromise with the dense collection of ugly backsides of buildings facing it, pressing in onto it, and the way the plaza was irregularly shaped, distorted and squashed by the limitation of the irregular London plot.

With a long thin projection out towards a neighbouring road, between two adjacent offices, and sporting a concrete frame structure that was either the remnants of a building, or whose purpose I just couldnt make out (perhaps a part of the City Skywalk that was meant to extend to here someday?), but from where you could get a perfect, front on dramatic view of the bluging facade of the tower as if from its very own little axial boulevard (see photos 3&4 below).

Like Centre Point and the Nat West Tower (the tallest Cantilevered building in the world) he lifted the main body of the building off of the plinth with some sculptural fingers that looked as if they used to be dramatically lit at night.

The space at the level of the raised plaza having no program in it apart from the core and stairs rising through it, so that you can easily see through the building to the full breadth of the site.

It was one of Seifert's more delicate designs and incorporated itself into the dense grain of the City in a layered, spatial manner that offered itself up gradually as you moved around, entered and navigated its levels, whilst still having a strong presence at each point. A much more considerate citizen of the Square Mile in its relation to the street than say all those 1980s KPF mimicking quasi-contextual beasts that covered their block-filling first three floors in granite and thereby claimed vernacular sensitivity...

and definitely much more interesting and worthy than its 2010 replacement by Foggo Assoc, that couldn't even bother with that, and just filled out the entire plot with the now typical Humungous-ginormous bank-loving trading-floor-worthy floorplates, all the way up to 73 metres, canyonising the surrounding streets and bringing a hacked and chopped up bit of Canary Wharf to this ancient site (it had been undeveloped since Roman times when the 1967 tower was built). I understand that clients want trading floors now, and a building with a floorplan like Drapers Gardens is impossible to let in the current climate (Centre Point is perennially difficult to rent out), but Im sure one can do better than what this was replaced with. I would have loved to do a simultaneous post on Britannic House, that great beast who was so much more impressive than Shell Mex House, which but for lack of a bit of stone never got listed, and that I took photos of with my old analogue camera, the photos from which have all been dispersed sometime ago in one or another move between flats somewhere in London...

^view from the street

Page Street Housing by Edwin Lutyens

2011-03-12T14:50:00.002Z

Page Street is a weird and interesting architectural in-betweener. Built on a large chunk of land given over to social housing in the 1920s by the Duke Of Westminster, it was designed by his then favourite architect Edwin Lutyens, who was mostly known for his palatial Country House designs, although he had been involved in the master-planning of Hampstead Garden Suburb just prior to this project, which meant working closely with Raymond Unwin, the great social housing designer of that period in the UK.

The grid marches across all but the internal facades of the blocks, framing traditional sash windows, and on the long sides looking like some RCA architecture student's project where hundreds of Georgian town houses have been collaged together in photoshop to make a fusion between the Bloomsbury conservation zone and the Heygate Estate. To make things odder, some of the main entrances facing the street are ornamented with heraldic sculpture, are fronted with imposing broken entablature arches with what look like little cenotaphs sticking out the top of them, and have a recessed central section and slightly projecting wings that make them look like Elizabethan palace fronts.

They also have remarkably early examples (for the UK, the first?) of deck access to the flats, reached from central courtyards, an area in the project where there is little stylistic reticence or ambiguity surrounding its programatic modernity, although the moment where (you can see it on the left and right of the image above) the deck balconies hit the sash windows and fragment to become part of the sash-window/brick/white-cement grid that covers the rest of the facades is pretty magical.

The strips of space between the U-shaped blocks is taken up with landscaped communal gardens and play areas which are a little desolate and dont get too much light, but they at least have a good sense of enclosure, and are directly watched over by lots of windows (easy to shout at your kids to come back upstairs or stop hitting each other), and rather cutely newsagents, hairdressers, shops etc are housed in little lodges arrayed along the road between the blocks and in front of the courtyard areas at the centre of the Us.

A bit like the Arts & Crafts building on Riding House Street in Fitzrovia (a workshop and offices) by H. Fuller Clark, this project is an imposing glimpse of what strange and contradictory buildings might have been designed if those british architects from Shaw through Arts & Crafts to Lutyens had brought their rhetorical talents to bear in the country's cities, and brought new programs, pressing social issues, and structural innovation together into dialogue with their wonderful & arcane stylistic concerns.

For more info, plans, sections, photos etc check out the development's page over on HousingPrototypes.

Tel Aviv Post Modern

2011-03-07T12:13:00.001Z

^I particularly like the peeling-back motif, and the vertiginous staircases that come out of the core and rise up to the rooftop pool.

^For more on this temple electricity substation see here.

Unfortunately my favourite, and by far and away the wackiest is under renovation and behind scaffolding. Hopefully they are not neutralising its oddness.

Pigmented Mini-Henge

2011-02-24T12:33:00.001Z

Pigmented glass pieces from the Orsoni Workshop in Venice, which are cut up to make "smalti", or mosaic tesserae. But here acting as an adult's excuse to play building blocks.

Avant-Garde meets Orthodoxy: The Ramot Polin Housing Complex

2011-02-18T15:11:00.003Z

Ramot Polin is a 720 unit social housing development in Jerusalem, built on land expropriated from the Palestinian village of Nabi Samwil from 1972 onwards, designed by Zvi Hecker, and part of a large government building campaign immediately following the 6-day war.

A certain degree of formal experimentation was allowed to pass in the rush to build, and so Hecker somehow managed to argue the case for these amazingly impractical honeycomb units on a combination of their modular replicability, and the speed at which they could be assembled, as well as a "these geometries are a part of the underlying structure of nature" type argument. They were quick to build and cheap, to boot they looked interesting, and so they were built.

The buildings are on a hill 4km north of central jerusalem, and as you approach, instead of looking like crystalline outcrops of pure geometrical forms, some of them are difficult to distinguish as entities of architecture at all, instead from afar they together manage to look just like a ramshackle village on a steep site, of which there are a few thereabouts.

Which is because the estate is an extreme example of the Israeli, and generally Middle-Eastern, tendency to radically alter and make additions to the family home outside of official planning regulations and permits.

The interior spaces are monumentally impractical, with large areas of unusable walls, horribly cramped balconies, windows that seem especially designed for children to fall out of, issues everywhere with rain screening, drainage, and lack of natural light, all amounting to the development from the beginning not attracting the middle income, secular families it was originally intended for.

The bold shapes lay empty, the government slashed rents, and a rather surprising, less assuming community slowly made it their home over the coming 30years. Several hundred Haredi Orthodox Jewish families, appreciating the low rents and seeing the awkwardness of the complex's layout as a very minor inconvenience indeed (as well as guarantee that others wouldnt follow) compared to some of the places they had previously been forced to call home, moved in on mass.

The isolated hilltop location was an added benefit, since the community could contain itself, protected, away from the rest of the city, developing into and through the Architecture to become a late 20th century version of the old Shtetls from the Pale of Settlement.

The unappealing oddness of the buildings themselves were much of the reason that these low income families could afford what are essentially very well specified apartments with full amenities, and as they set about adjusting the estate, flat by flat, year by year, staircase by staircase, to fit their evolving needs, and in some cases growing wealth, they never fully efface Hecker's forms, instead inserting variation and enhancement within, and on top of, his modular layout.

Initially minor practical alterations like plugging nooks and crannies that attract dirt and animals, sealing open edges, were followed by changes to open up the cave-likeness of the interiors to make them more livable by adding proper balconies, larger windows, air-conditioning and straightening a wall here and there, whilst more recently, together with these changes which keep being made, residents are enlarging their flats, and adding extra rooms, with each addition having its own set of materials and look of its own. Rather than consuming the original buildings, these changes bring Hecker's project to life, integrating it inseparably to the growth, development, workings and identity of a minority community, in a way realising his biological metaphors.

Not everywhere has changed so much, it is mostly the blocks that have several generations of the same families living in them that have taken full authorship over their surroundings, and have altered them alot. In the blocks which have changed dramatically, there is an unexpectedly organic union between the abstractions of Architectural Formalism, and the exigencies of everyday life and specific community needs. The project's fate, and its continuing life and evolution, is in stark contrast to Robin Hood Gardens (a fundamentally more liveable complex) in East London (finished the same year as this started), and other social housing schemes in the UK that are not only being unceremoniously cleared of their buildings, but also their residents and communities -the seed of their survival and adaptation, in the continuation in a different form of New Labour's damaging, euphemistically named 21st century slum-clearance scheme, Pathfinder.

Went to Dorset

2011-02-07T11:05:00.001Z

Was very foggy. Above is the chapel of St Catherine near Abbotsbury, and below is a high ridge near the sea that -as you can see- affords "panoramic views over the stunning West Dorset countryside"...

I also visited Poundbury, but then if I talk about it here or post any pictures, that might give the impression that I found it in any way important, relevant, or even interesting. And I didnt. Salisbury Cathedral however was magnificent, and all the more for me presuming beforehand that it was just all about its silhouette, when in fact its interior is far more impressive. Its the most elegant and composed of the churches ive visited in England, having a massive, sculpted sobriety relatively missing in all the other fussy, haphazard or just plain dull British medieval Cathedral interiors ive seen (visits that are in no way exhaustive i must add). Apologies that photos do not follow here, but none of the images i took in any way convey its stoney qualities...

Two Medieval Men Kissing & Other Delights

2011-02-02T09:55:00.000Z

This is a round encaustic tile from a medieval English pavement. The sequence of images tell a story (apologies but I cannot remember which story... it involved a king. Duh), and are the earliest set of surviving figural tiles from the British Isles. Although the men appear to be, and are indeed kissing on the lips, this was a way of passing on luck, and wishing well, for a journey rather than any more Hellenic form of younger-older male bonding.

Rather more appropriate to ambivalent European depictions of love is this delicate, but morbid, depiction by a Flemish painter from the fifteenth century, of a knight courting his object of desire. Pallid and gaunt, looking as if they have a cold, red-tinged flesh flaring at their nostrils and the sides of their mouths, the pair are watched by a disconcertingly over-eager figure of Death, who is either a reminder of the folly of earthly passions, or a stark description of what will be awaiting the man should his entreaties be rejected by the fair damsel. Fittingly the whole thing is painted on the bowing shape of a ceremonial shield.

Above is a scene from an object tenuously named "The Standard of Ur" that has survived from the ancient Sumerian town of the same name, and was recovered from a large Royal tomb. Its surface is decorated in minute mosaics, and show on one side an image of "War" and on the other "Peace", the photo here being from the side of Peace, cattle, goats, harvest and all.

Also from near Ur is this 4500 year old mosaic encrusted column, one of several found at the site of a temple dedicated to the god Ninhursag. At its heart were palm logs, covered in Bitumen, and around which were attached pieces of mother-of-pearl, pink limestone, and black shale. Each tessera had a copper wire passed through a loop at the back of it and the ends twisted into a ring. The wire was then sunk into the bitumen for attachment. When discovered in 1919, the archaeologists found that the columns were exactly the same diameter as modern petrol drums and so during reconstruction, sections of tesserae, held in place by bandages dipped in wax, were wrapped around empty drums to restore their original shape.

All these items are on public display, free of charge, at the British Museum

Megastructural Infrastructure: The Tel Aviv Central Bus Station

2011-01-27T08:26:00.001Z

The "station" is a vast, 3dimensional infrastructural knot that draws buses into its volume via fly-overs from the nearby highways, its 10 floors house 800 bus and coach stops which see buses lined up high above the surrounding skyline. But the fly-overs, ramps, roads, depots, bus-stops and parking lots are only a sideshow. They are just an excuse for the creation of a veritable city of in-between crevices, passages, chasms, and halls. Left-over spaces that are formed between the spaghetti pile of intersecting and stacked infrastructure, and which are filled by shops, markets, offices, doctors, restaurants, community centres, billiards halls, synagogues, hair dressers, you name an urban amenity or program and it will be there, clinging to the place's vast forms and labyrinthine corridors like a mad, florescent, candy-coloured coral reef.

It took 26 years to get built, opening in 1993, originaly designed in 1967 by Ada and Ram Karmi, in the megastructural spirit of that period, a sort of inflated Cumbernauld on a drug binge, in a down and out part of a dense metropolis. The building/thing fully occupies an 11 Acre (4.4 Hectare) plot in the heart of South Tel Aviv, and houses upwards of 230,000m² (2.5million square feet) of official floor space, which is the equivalent of two One Canada Square Towers, all crammed inside what from the exterior one would not be able to describe as an occupied building at all. There are no windows visible from the outside or inside until you reach the bus stops on the upper levels, and when daylight does filter through, it seems to always come from some unidentifiable, vague source, somewhere above, from between the shifted floor-plates, ziga-zagging escalators, and bulging concrete forms.

^The YouTube video shows a couple of walk throughs and some shots of the life and space inside the station.

Its external walls and elevated roads are omnipresent in the neighbourhood, either constantly popping up at the end of alleyways, behind buildings, or revealing themselves by the momentary sight of the top half of a bus seeming to glide along the roof of a block of flats.

It is sheer, brutal, and concrete. Formally unrelenting and aggressive in the way it seems to insist on negating itself as a piece of architecture, its relationship to the city is the precise inverse of the little electricity substation I described in a previous post. Where that was visually generous but bereft of any life whatsoever, adorned with ceremonial entrances, but nothing to enter in to do, the Central Bus Station in no way betrays its internal riches and abundant life, offering up the charm of a dirty public loo to the surrounding streets, and relatively few, and tiny, really -TINY, little entrances squashed under the weight of the mountains of concrete above.

As the fly-overs converge on the station they run above existing streets at about the level of the surrounding buildings, meaning that most of the windows in those apartment face a quasi-interior space created between the edge of the main complex and the underside of the roads. While a similar situation may feel gloomy in another city, here the respite from the sun is a relief. These dark spaces are vividly animated, noisy and crowded as hell, livened up with buses thundering on above, the local traffic honking at a standstill below, the clusters of small stalls and shops that seem to thrive on the outside of the station only here in the shade, and the casually relaxed, if sometimes shouting (for apparently no reason) residents overlooking the whole scene from their partially interiorised balconies.

At some point in the past 18 years there was an effort, much like at London's Barbican, to make the building more legible, and orientation within it a little easier, by adding a bold graphical numbering system and lots of signs that try and point you to your desired numerical destination. For a first time visitor they only act to highlight the complexity of the place, by reminding you at every juncture how even the people who run the station cannot explicate it clearly. And its not just like that for first time visitors. I've spoken to city residents who have used the building many times, and who still dread the disorientating experience of having to navigate its multiple levels, halls and corridors every time they must catch a bus to somewhere else in the country, on time, before it leaves from level squillion, stop 699, without you. There was a quote on the Wikipedia page for the station, since removed but still on the architect's page, where the current manager of the complex said that "if I caught the architect who designed this building, I'd beat him up". Id ask for plans and sections.

The interior is so vast that as you wander around there is a large degree of variation in the amount of activity going on in different areas. There are whole floors where nothing seems to be happening at all, at least when compared to the dense activity occurring in many other places, zones which dont appear to be connected to the general circulation routes in any direct way, viewed obliquely from far away across one of the many atriums. But whilst they seem inactive, people do find them and use them in their own ways, and they are occupied at certain times by activity groups. For instance in the youtube video there is a shot of one of these empty zones being used for a (pretty awful) breakdance gathering. In others I saw people praying, snogging, eating and just simply gathering (a crowd of phillipninas).

The atriums are wildly sculptural, Piranesi meets Corb via Stirling type spaces. The central MacDonalds-crowned-one being the busiest, with the other ones marching away from it getting steadily less cramped until they become huge inert architectural sideshows.

Almost everywhere one finds odd spaces generated by the ramps, shifted half-levels, and massive bevelled forms of the Architecture being turned into small enterprises. The underside of ramps are opened up to be shops, the painted bulbous form above becomes a snooker bar, the underside of an empty piazza in one of the deserted areas below is a gym and physiotherapy centre, and (6photos up and 3down) circular viewing balconies are turned into little kiosk-rotunda-pergolas.

In a city where it is difficult for immigrants to overtly display their presence, the station's labyrinthine interior provides a welcome sense of privacy and protection. There are Phillipino, Sudanese and Ethiopian restaurants, community centres, shops, hairdressers, family planning clinics, and just as importantly, public places to gather. Below is a Russian Orthodox bookstore, replete with a rather overeager deployment of plastic Israeli flags. There is also a man from a religious denomination that sells kosher-le-pesach hot dogs (above) wrapped in wet Matza during the pesach holiday. The offering, which when combined with the bits of sausage skin and flecks of Matza crumbs adorning the gentleman's beard, announcing to all and sundry his personal gusto for the tepid and stomach-churning fare, that he seems to enjoy constantly prodding with his hand, is what I think I may fairly call anything but appealing. Hence his full tray of unsold... stuff.

A bit of a Rogers/Piano inspired touch for the ventilation.

Pug.

Walking around the outdoor areas of the upper floors, one has the distinct feeling (and probably a correct assumption) that the whole building was dropped into an unsuspecting residential neighbourhood, and that somehow the neighbourhood hasn't really been able to adapt. Or rather the building never made any attempt to adapt to it. Around the sides, where hundreds of bus drivers and passengers every day drive past the windows of flats only meters away, the residents have the only recourse of keeping the shutters of their windows permanently closed during the station's working hours. But then if the building had been more open to the surrounding area, permeable and transparent and legible, it would not have developed any of its intriguing complexities, and capacity for harbouring people and program that is otherwise not welcome in the rest of town, or simply cannot afford to pay enough rent to survive anywhere else.

And everywhere on the great body of this beast, even at the points where it is at its most grim, are the unmistakeable signs of the interior life that it spawns. Pipes, wires, air-conditioning units crawl along its walls, attach themselves to its ledges, cluster in wild tangles around holes drilled here and there in its monolithic mass, fighting to get inside.

With -as you wonder around its multi-leveld periphery- the occasional, surprise glimpses from the abandoned feeling sweeps of sunburnt concrete, of bustling, loud, and colourful goings on...

And, but of course, just next door, luring you across the road with its enticing and illicit content: the KINGDOM OF PORK!

A Green Trick Around Planning Regs

2011-01-23T22:05:00.000Z

The planning regulations in this suburb in central Israel state that all walls facing the street at the front of properties must be a maximum of 80cm in height from the centre of the plot, with walls meaning permanent constructions, not greenery.

Now Im not quite sure how the family got away with it, but this house has a quite beautifully executed trellis covered in Astroturf that sits atop their regulation wall, rising in some places to over two and a half meters. They even neatly sowed the Astroturf up around any plants that had branches outside of the wall-line, kindly leaving a few lemons and limes as recompense for passers-by denuded of their right to see into the front garden of said plot.

It has apparently been there for around a year now, so must have been tacitly accepted by the municipality. I guess the combination of its temporary trellis-like structural nature, and its saturated food-colouring green pigmentation rendered it far enough away from the material stature of your standard Israeli suburban wall to distract the council officers from the fact that it still does exactly what the planning rule had meant to avoid, namely stop the breeze flowing through plots, and block all visual penetration through the neighborhood.

Still, having said that, and after the councilmen have wandered off pleased by the thought that really it is just another hedge of greenery, I must add that it is the most outstanding architectural element in the whole area. It shows the most ingenuity, wit, and playfulness with materials, and also reacts best with the blinding sun, to which it doesn't submit, but rather glows and radiates in a strength and vibrance that is in direct proportion to the aggression of the light.

The Shard Under Construction at Dawn On A Saturday

2011-01-22T18:49:00.005Z

Skyscraper construction is sublime, reverse ruination. It temporarily inverts urban anxieties, extruding them instead into the vertiginous thrill of novelty, and the rarely indulged guilty pleasures of a biblical human thirst for grandiose conceit. Particularly in little, terrified, victorian, low-density London.

When its completed it will be elegant, and reflective, and transparent, and exquisitely finished, and monumental, but Mr Renzo Piano's tower will never again be as beautiful as it is now, with its highest crane disappearing into the clouds, beams swaying as they are hoisted up, floodlights illuminating hundreds of tiny builders moving about amongst piles of waiting material, steel frame uninterrupted and open to the elements, and the battlement, the real tower, the anchor, the massive stepped solid concrete core that just brings the whole thing back to the past somehow, pinning it to the weightiness of Romanesque piers, the density of Roman cast concrete vaults, and the blind verticality of Tuscany's medieval towers, it is the muscle at the centre that is slowly being covered up, all of it, as the shiny skin creeps skywards.

I just wish we could all go up there and have a swing on a few girders before all the floors are clad, breathe some of the air up there, lean over the edge of a floor without railings, climb the ladder up to one of the crane cabs... but then this isn't 1930s New York.

Crystal Tower Palace

2011-01-17T19:05:00.003Z

I went to see this watercolour render today at a viewing in Bonhams. It was a response by the architect C. Burton in 1851/2 to calls for ideas about what to do with the Crystal Palace after the end of the great exhibition. The design was published in "The Builder" in 1852.

Dreamt up before the Eiffel Tower, the proposal was to turn the structural elements and glass of the great greenhouse by Joseph Paxton into a 1000ft tapering tower, for the purposes both of storage of items from the worlds fair, and for the delight and viewing pleasure of the public. In effect combining some of the era's encyclopedic hoarding tendencies, already evinced in the program of the archival Victoria tower at Westminster, and the period's equally prevalent leisurely frivolousness, here embodied as the sheer celebratory thrill of rising above your surroundings, a delight explored previously only in smaller dimensions at Kew's pagoda.

The archival tendency prevails in the setting of the tower, which interestingly is not situated in London, or any real location, but is set against a backdrop of the world's monuments, each receding further into the distance with some use of atmospheric perspective, and the tower's foreground is a sort of open air architectural museum, an artifactual pleasure garden filled variously with the Sphinx, Abu Simbel and Stonehenge, all of which provide a kind of historic build up to the great Victorian achievement which crowns and contains them all, the Crystal-Palace-cum-library-tower. The image has something of Joseph Gandy in its confusion of eras, but none of his sublime exploration of time and decay, or the vigor of simultaneity, this is all about collecting the past as you would souvenirs, somewhere closer to Pannini providing wealthy British aristocrats with paintings of Roman monuments clustered together in impossible vistas (get everything in just one painting: great value), so that in their new and upwardly mobile mansions they could display at once their knowledge and ownership of the past, but also their surpassing of it.

The tower itself looks like The Tower Of London sitting on top of the Crystal Palace crossing, with Victoria Tower sprouting out of that, and finally an industrial chimney popping up out of that and rising up to the full height (very British). It would have been 63 feet less than the Eiffel Tower, and just 13feet less than Renzo Piano's Shard which is currently going up in London Bridge, with which Im sure it would have made a lovely pair.

The background reminded me alot of the print below that I have hanging in front of my loo (which inevitably I spend an inordinate amount of time examining) that quite raucously details in elevation all the tall buildings in the world just prior to the advent of the skyscraper. Drawings like this must have been popular at the time and I can imagine Mr Burton designing his proposal with its towering and triumphant presence in a drawing such as this in mind; a collection of buildings -heavy and honorable- but with his lightweight recycled transparent confection soaring above, to be collected together and displayed in people's living rooms, all over Britain, and the Continent, and the Commonwealth...

The sale will be on the 19th January, if any1 buys it please let me know!

The Daily Express Building and A Papal Visit

2010-12-31T17:07:00.000Z

On the same day as London Open House the Pope was visiting the city to give a fantastically camp service in Hyde Park, although perhaps not as camp as this recent performance in the Luigi-Nervi reception hall in The Vatican. So as well as visiting the lobby of the Art Deco Daily Express Building, I went to see a bit of the Hyde Park hysteria, and stumbled into the anti-pope protests in both Hyde Park Corner and Whitehall. I bought some devout paraphernalia including a Union Jack with the Papal symbol on it, and a Pope badge, as well as later being treated to a free "Arrest The Pope" T-shirt by the protestors, which of course I simply had to join all together into a perfectly poised outfit that cancelled itself out, representing my slightly elated amusement at the whole shebang. Check out how painfully/amusingly low both sides slung with their rhetoric, encapsulated by Richard The Lionhearted Atheist, Mr Dawkins, in his speech to the protestors. I have issue with church-led state funded schools, a policy which blurs the line between religion and state, a line that in England and Wales needs to be rendered clearer and sharper, but I have absolutely no problem with the Catholic church and its followers per se.

I probably have more issues with the silent monster that resides behind this spectacular stage-set lobby on Fleet Street. Goldman Sachs renovated the building a few years ago as their new European Headquarters, cleaning the lobby and returning it to its original state (minus all the hustle, bustle and activity), but placing it behind curtains that are almost always shut, contrary to English Heritage suggestions that the little 1930s costume jewelry box should be visible to the general public from the street.

The whole space feels like being on the stage of a great, dancing, 1930s production on Broadway, everything glittering and reflected in chrome plate, silver leaf, and gilt metal, paper thin surfaces, and shallow reliefs organised in exotic motifs, all used to theatrical effect.

Its just so strange that this lobby, clearly meant to show off in a very public way, the open face of an old media empire, personifying its illustrious figurehead in the public's imagination, should now be shrouded, hidden away as the private accessory of one of the most publicity averse organisations in the finance industry, the company often seen as the faceless behemoth of corporate rapacity, harborer of an extreme form of singularly unproductive individualism.

Anyway, it is/was a fun space, naive and silly as a carnival float, even if a bit sad in its current clinical emptiness, but still nowhere near as fun as playing the game of 'spot the funniest pope placard' that followed when we got to the protests.

some of the protestors were intentionally humorous

Others were themselves quite hilarious in their miscalculated ridicule, like below, the distinctly illiberal and repressive slogan for a march for 'liberty': "Dont like being laughed at? Then dont have such funny beliefs"

The best for me had to be the one above quite eloquently comparing the pope to the evil Emperor in Star Wars, and you have to admit that the similarity is both terribly unfortunate, and very funny.

^free t-shirt

Three Flourishes From Paris

2010-12-29T12:55:00.001Z

^Man altercating with his drum on a Moving Walkway in (i think) Chatelet metro station

^box of eyes in a dolls parts stall in the Marché aux Puces St-Ouen de Clignancourt

^ Painting in the Gustave Moreau Museum

Kyoto & Rome

2010-12-28T16:20:00.001Z

^ Ornament inside Santa Maria del Priorato, on the Aventine in Rome. Piranesi.

Hotel Marion, Kyoto, Japan

Severin's Observatory

2010-11-11T19:55:00.002Z

In the German pavilion at the Biennale there is a tall box, about the same size as a phone booth, in one of the rooms flanking the main hall, which emits the deep sound of a man speaking, his voice can only be made out as you approach the rear of the box and lean in to a window in its side.

Through the window is a model of what looks like a monumental observatory, whose real size is belied by the windows on the walls behind, which seem to dwarf its pomp to that of a doll's house. The voice is slowly, in a manner somewhere between that of a documentary and a fairytale, telling over and over again, in italian, english and german, the story of Eugene Severin, an amateur astronomer from the early 20th century.

Severin was paralysed from an early age, and was fawned over by his wealthy parents, who did everything to ease the child's difficult life, eventually building him a study room in an empty garden house at their estate, where he spent most of his youth in the care of his maid, conducting science experiments, studying astrology, and dreaming of one day becoming an astronomer, of discovering vast new worlds from the tiny and enclosed world he inhabited. As a young man he came into a large inherited fortune, and bought a plot of land outside Berlin, where he planned to fulfill his dreams, commissioning the architect Olaf Malmhoff to build him a magnificent observatory in which to live and work for the rest of his life, gazing at the stars. He would spend days in anticipation of the newfound pleasure of living there, of how different it would be to the isolation of his life up until that point, imagining himself as a recognised scientist making important discoveries, holding court to famous parties for the elite of the city at his observatory. He filled his time thinking such thoughts as the period of construction dragged on and on, with the architect embezzling vast sums of money from the project, and failing to mention to Severin how vast, towering tenement blocks were being erected all around his little observatory, right up to the edge of its little plot, blocking out the daylight, and at night, all but a few stars in Orion's belt. Severin only found out when he visited the building upon its completion. With no money left of his fortune, having had it whittled away by the lengthy construction and Malmhoff's embezzlement, Severin moved into the observatory together with the same maid he had lived with since childhood. He continued to live there, staring through his telescope at the small patch of sky that could be seen through the cornices of the tenements, until his death in the early 60s. His niece, a failed writer, now opens the house to visitors for a small fee.

The theme of the German Pavilion, brilliantly illustrated in Severin's story box, is Sehnsucht, or a powerful feeling of longing twinned with a sense of irretrievable loss, and how this concept manifests itself in the urban realm, addressed elegantly in Severin's story through the weaving together of the pity of a personal tragedy, the sting of rural retreat, the meanness and avarice of industry, and the communal pathos of the restricted urban horizon and the confined gaze, all compressed into one powerfully evocative architectural scenario that manages itself, silently, to contain and convey the sense of longing and sadness of the entire tale.

The main hall is full of architect's sketches responding to the notion of Sehnsucht (one of which below), mostly not managing to connect with its potentially powerfull emotional content, possibly because so many of them seem to be ideal proposals, nostalgic constructions from the creator's imagination that achieve something they have always desired, or long missed. And these completely negate the power of sehnsucht, which exactly lies in the deferral of arrival, it gains in potency the further it is from reaching that which it longs for, and indeed gains strength the more vague the object of longing becomes. The architects and their sketches construct answers to the feeling of longing, as if it were a problem with a solution, when really the beauty of it is in its contemplation, in the exploration of the actual feeling of longing itself as a shared contemporary condition that unites all of us, and which can be stimulated in us, connecting us more intimately with each other and our surroundings through stories, and places like those of Eugene Severin and his little eclipsed observatory.

Plant-Pets, Good Metabo, An Illuminated Cedric Price, and An Upturned Boat at the Venice Biennale 2010

2010-11-07T14:05:00.172Z

Above is a film of some of the stuff in the Biennale, quite a bit of the Serbian pavilion by Skart, which I adored, along with everyone who visited it (as evidenced in the film and by the fact everyone I have spoken to ended up talking to people they didnt know, playing with them, and giggling together like little kids), the Cloudscapes installation where a micro-climate was regulated in a part of the Corderie, a cloud hovering at the height of a bridge that took you right up into it, as well as some Olafur Eliasson atmospherics (where were the naked dancers?!), a couple of super-cruise liners, some washing being taken in, an orchestral sound-bath, the nail house in Shenzhen, and alot of wind and umbrellas...

The Serbian pavilion was clearly the best at initiating interaction between both the visitors themselves, and between the visitors and the actual objects in the space, which was filled with see saws and cyborg-like plant-objects that looked like cute cartoon animals crossed with everyday objects of motion, each of them inviting you to take it for a walk with a little handle and bicycle bell.

The japanese pavilion was a triumph of architectural curation, seamlessly co-ordinating a take on what is best in the contemporary japanese urban condition, as a set of potentialities, with how those possibilities can and are being taken up at the scale of the building to produce a sort of city-as-household (presented as a form of atomised, total democratic space), grounded in the minute calibration of daily activity and its relationship to the exterior, and all of this represented through large doll-house models that let your imagination immediately occupy the kinds of places that the words and the videos were describing, a set up that got around many of the usual conundrums of curating architecture in its actual physical absence. But the routines, activities, and manner of living implied in the architecture of Atelier Bow Wow are a known quantity, they are buildings that deftly handle the needs of a class of inner city professionals whose scope of existence we are all familiar with, and there was something slightly suffocating by the end of the last collection of cubic containers, a sort of lack of space to dream in: the Serbian pavilion saved it for me, provided a ludicrous and delightful addendum, acting as a kind of what if, or but... and maybe -it zoomed in on that one scale which was purposely left out -or rather rendered implicit- in the Japanese designs, the manner in which people's relationships to their surroundings can be reconfigured in refreshingly liberating, and impossibly re-imagined ways, rather than subtly practical ways. There was a suggestion in the Serbian pavilion of Architecture coming to life, of buildings and spaces actively participating as agents of pleasure and delight in our everday lives, like dogs, cats and garden-plants, silently waiting to be patted and causing people in their interiors, rooms and by their walls to stop, talk and play with them a bit, like people stopping to ask the name of another stroller's dog, and how old he is, and give him a brisk cuddle, whilst getting to know the other owner too. Then the nature of architecture as a container, and a delicate calibrator of things and people begins to shift, and it transforms into an active agent, not a controlling manipulator, but an agent of creative occupation and imaginative play... a loosening agent and one that by making everything strange again, opens up the possibility of us being and acting differently too. As we all seemed to be doing in Skart's laboratory.

In the Italian Pavilion at the Giardini, also curated by Kazuyo Sejima, I got caught in a wonderful little lozenge-shaped side room off of some exhibit or other, in which there was a table with one pair of headphones and a screen, showing a series of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist of Cedric Price, which I believe were interrupted by his untimely death in 2003.

Sharp but bumbling, inspirational and radical but so intensely British, Cedric came across as immensely charming, remembering stories about his projects with a delight that was glowing with the cheekiness of a naughty child, savoring his counter intuitive rebelliousness with the sensibility of a character situated somewhere between that of a stone thrower in the Paris streets of 68, and of the well intentioned prankster in the corridors of any post-war English Grammar School. He recalled one project in Sheffield (I think it was there) where he was in charge of an installation event for publicizing a theatre festival in the city, and he decided to paint dimensions onto the facades of certain well known buildings in the centre, but to put incorrect figures like 16inches on a 12storey high tower, and so on, an action that rapidly led to an outcry at the inaccuracy, with local people writing to the local newspapers and radio stations indignant at being taken for idiots, demanding to know what the meaning of such tomfoolery was, and in the act of complaining and generating a fuss, of course providing more free publicity than would have ever otherwise been possible (as well as the fact that the dimensions provided a trail straight to the entrance of the said theatre).

His cheekiness seemed as he talked to go hand in hand with a love for human nature, for freeing up people's potentials by giving them opportunities to achieve their dreams through a type of negative architecture that provided room for difference and desire, a strong element of his proposals for the Fun Palace and Non Plan, where in the one he provides the framework for re-imagining the city around it through play (he made the point in the film that it was not meant to be an escape, "to escape awful london, no it was a key to realising how wonderful life was. It was the launchpad to delight, and perhaps the delight was freedom of choice. It was the thing that would make you pleased to open the door of your home and see, however it was your life looked, that it was good"), and in the other an imagined libertopia free from paternalistic judgements on taste and spatial organisation where local character would evolve itself out of the space between dialogue and individual design, a plan that has recently been posited as an unwitting intellectual predecessor to Thatcherism's, and then Blairism's Development Districts, exemplifed by the London Docklands (and its now deceased LDDC) and its sprawl of isolated, unplanned, unrestricted developments. But for me the difference at its heart comes down to his genuine care for and focus on the individual human, and groups of people, and his or her or their capacity to actively participate in a creative environment and re-imagine his or herself or themselves as better and more qualitatively fulfilled people, whereas Thatcherite planning policies had the abstract noun "Consumer" at their heart, basically a euphemism for her debased version of the "market", not even subhuman, but rather automatons that were meant to choose between a set of options that were given to them by the companies which dominated and distorted the real estate market, eliminating any of the fine grain of true liberty imagined in non-plan, turning the city into a collection of huge assets to be speculated on rather than worked on and enjoyed, a sort of total antithesis to the Tokyo presented in the Japanese pavilion: Tokyo Midtown rather than the small streets around it, Seifert rather than Betjeman.

In relation to that point of differentiation, the idea of dialogue via architecture kept coming up, the point and place where individuals mediate their desire into something shared: "For years architecture was a way of imposing order, that everything will be okay if you behave. Thats religion's role. Architecture shouldn't do that. Its too slow anyway, and in any case I don't want to do that. It should create dialogue, perhaps thats its only reason." He then went on to tease Obrist by saying that theres a set of criteria that some famous old guy came up with, he couldn't remember who, perhaps Ulrich would know: Commodity, Firmness and Delight! He went on "Commodity is money, good house-keeping essentially. Firmness is the structure, and delight, thats the one, thats the dialogue." "The dialogue, its isnt hello theres the birds and the bees. It might be quite harrowing. But it will look towards a better future." And thats the strongest kernel I took away with me from the part of the interviews I watched, that staunch belief in the difficult task of maintaining the idea of a better future,

He kept getting up to look for projects to show Obrist, but somehow never managed to find anything, and he always kept looking in the same place, telling Obrist jokingly how he was making it look like he didnt have a proper filing system, all of which looks as if it was bought from the Rymans around the corner, together with the brilliantly standard Rymans calendar hanging on the wall behind him, which one sees everywhere in Britain from the dentist and GP to Uni and the office. Three images above you can see a diagram which was scribbled on some paper on his desk that Obrist filmed as he panned around the room whilst Cedric was answering what sounded like one of those old phones that people now copy the ringing of on their iphones. Two of the walls were covered with blown up images of Cedric's ideogrammatic sketches that are about as eloquent and charming as he is in the interview, standing up in my mind in immediate and strong opposition to Leon Krier's closed, and sarcastic equivalents.

There is also more of Ulrich Obrist and his encyclopaedic tendencies over in the Corderie where there is a room of interviews with other architects and artists (each with a little screen, its own dvd player, and a SANAA designed chair), and of the 24 hour Marathon in the Serpentine Pavilion 2006 (which I worked on whilst at OMA), a part of which I ended up watching with Shumon Basar and Iain Sinclair being interviewed by Obrist and Rem Koolhaas, Sinclair starting off with a virtuoso display of Rhetorical conceit, and Shumon winning hands down in the fashion stakes with a totaly ott white blazer.

And to finish I am posting some images of Stirling and Wilford's upturned boat bookshop in the Giardini (the last building finished before his death), a beautiful remnant from a lost and fascinating era that greets visitors to the Biennale like the Diplodocus in the entrance hall to the Natural History Museum in London, indistinct as to its full biology, context and reasons for existing, but intriguing and allusive, drawing you in to wonder and imagine as to where this building came from, and what it signifies...

Actually one more thing... a quote from Phillip K Dick's 1978 Lecture "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" that I picked up in the Belgium Pavilion, and which I think pin points an important line between the ends that techniques are used for and those techniques themselves, and that involves power accrued and abused in relation to techniques of simulation and effect that are too easily rejected from architecture, powerful tools that they are, because of their association with malignant forms of capital and power:

"So I ask in my writing, what is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have alot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know, I do the same thing."

Gehry's Whale And Zaha's Billboard In La Rioja

2010-10-03T12:45:00.000+01:00

Gehry's Hotel Marques De Riscal in Elciego, La Rioja, gives plenty to its surroundings, lots of floaty-lite shiny pretty purply wavy surfaces of ooooh so lovely titanium that glint in the sun and reflect sunsets and glitter at night and stuff like that, and which also -by an incredible sleight-of-hand- simultaneously imprison its well-healed guests in a cage of mad steel beams that stab mindlessly in every direction, sticking into the body of the place like pins into a vodoo doll, whilst also managing to -almost- completely hide the remarkable mediocrity, the total early nineties "rent-a-plan" banality of its interiors.

Perhaps this is an ironic double reflex against the pretensions of the guests and the owner? The empty heart of the icon and the wealth it carries... Perhaps its confusing array of wavy corridors that leave you disorientated not because of any crashing forms, but because of a total lack of any distinguishing mark, together with their alienating in-between spaces populated with Gehry furniture that no one will ever sit on, perhaps they are a 21st century take on Kafka's institutional interiors, but here being an analogised space of global abstraction and endless seriality, which on purpose leaves the occupant lost with an overwhelming sense of sickening deja-vu.

Perhaps, but really its that Gehry must have only ever looked at the pretty sexy model from the outside, and thats where all the money went (the budget for this was around 100million euros, a comparable amount to the bilbao guggenheim). The interior is detritus, the result of a struggle to fit all the program in between the wavy-wavies, while still adhering to Spain's building regs.

In case you ever get lost -which I guarantee you will- there is always a handy scribble neaby, blown up to A1 and framed, to remind you that you are in the result of a moment of genius, from the mind of a genius, and that the sinking feeling in your stomach as you pass another huge window overlooking another bunch of steel beams, must actually be a conceived part of it, must have been intended, otherwise it might mean either that you cant comprehend the immensity of his genius, or its all a ridiculous joke that you, sucker, wasted 300 euros on, and either of those options is best pushed to the back of the mind. For now.

Thankfully, underneath the hotel, in a huge hidden sockle, are the wine-making facilities of the Bodega, where some real doing goes on. Some hardcore aging, bottling and packaging of around 6million bottles a year of that great stuff, Rioja wine, which (if you can drink enough of it, and perhaps mix it with some of the fortified stuff) can easily and surely take you, and whoever is drinking with you, to an equally curvy, and far more exhilarating place, wherever you happen to be, than the preposterous one squatting above the workers and their wine, like some colossal dead beached whale covered in carnivorous beatles.

And nearby is the Vina Tondonia by Zaha, a forlorn "building" whose spirit is definitively broken, its amazingness left behind in a thumbnail somewhere on some design blog, archived in January or February 2009.

All thats left now is what looks like an unused car park, but an unused car park with markings that would definitely not help any car park, or do anything, except, rather excitingly after a couple of minutes trying to figure it out, realise that they all eventually line up with the lines on the building's facade. Amazing!

I dont normally care much about details, but when the structure of the building, and the panels of the floor are so proportionately unfit for showing the items that they were intended to display, pushing them to the periphery, stacked any which way and in any awkward corner,

the situation tends to bring the details out to the fore, as a possible saving grace. Perhaps if the space as an object were beautifuly resolved, one could somehow forgive it being so resolutely unfit for what it was actually meant to do as a wine shop. Needless to say nothing was saved, and there was little grace creeping up between the yawning gaps in the floor,

or falling from the shattered glass of the rain-proofing canopy -which according the the staff, allegedly shatters again every time, soon after being replaced, and allows water through;

and there definitely wasnt enough space for any saving graces in the miniscule room for the three staff members squashed in the back, who apparently cant move their elbows freely for want of knocking into each other.

However there might, just possibly, be some of the stuff slipping off from the corpulent facade, and down into some colourful signs that at least there are some children in the area who like spending time around the place.

The guy working there at the time was quite up front with us, saying that the owners had wanted the building to be a billboard, to bring people in, and that despite certain grievances with its high cost, and with the practicalities and condition of it after only four years, they were pleased that it was indeed bringing international visitors to their bodega. I couldnt help shaking the feeling that if a building's main purpose is to be a billboard, it should perhaps be more eloquent, or at least louder, and less, well, shabby. Gehry should have done something here -the interior almost not having a purpose- and zaha, judging by the luxurious LG Hi Macs perfection of her floor at the Hotel Puerta America, should have hopped over to Elciego.

Arts & Crafts Goes Budget and Comes To London: The Mary Ward Settlement in Bloomsbury

2010-09-27T09:02:00.000+01:00

^ photo by George P. Landow

I visited the Mary Ward Centre (previously Mary Ward Settlement) during London Open House. It was a socialy radical experiment spearheaded by the writer Mary Ward, one of those great late Victorian women who, like Dame Henrietta Barnett, the founder of Toynbee Hall, and builder of Hampstead Garden Suburb, combined in one great personality the strong conservative, religious and politicaly reactionary beliefs (Ward was head of the Anti-Suffrage league) of a lady of the empire, with a vehement moral outrage towards the rather despicable condition of the poor and underprivileged in society. She actively put into practice unusually progressive social principles in the settlement, however they were always orchestrated with typically rigorous Victorian ethics. The local population, of all classes, paid a small sum, and through the settlement had access to free legal representation, a library, music classes, concerts, training facilities for the unemployed, after-school care, as well as England's first school for physically handicapped children. The tension between upright order, and creative flexibility, between ancient tradition and equality and free will -so characteristic of Britain at the time- plays itself out as much through the architecture as it did through the services the building provided, or the character of its Grande Dame. Barely eight years after the publication of News From Nowhere, and built the same year as Ebenezer Howard founded the Garden City Association, the settlement was one of the first practical steps taken towards realising the utopian values of the Arts and Crafts movement in the civic, and particularly, the urban realm. Arts and Cratfs architecture had been almost exclusively private country houses up to that point, and the following Garden City developments by Unwin and Howard would be essentially anti-urban, diluting the city into a an endless quasi pastoral landscape, but the Mary Ward Settlement was placed in the heart of London's dense, crowded Bloomsbury, right near the intelectual hub that was UCL (Mary Ward's circle was a precursor to the later Bloomsbury set), serving the existing situation rather than running away from it, or trying to build an entirely new one elsewhere.

It makes me wish that more architecture like it had been built in London. The way it sets up its own symetrical monumentality with its two corner towers and central range, and then proceeds to joyfuly break it down means that the building both has its civic, formal presence for the wider street, but dissolves into a dynamic collection of distinct facades as you walk around it. This happens because what would usually be the focus of attention, the central wall and huge overhang, are here left blank, whilst the peripheries are busied with decoration (a pagan tree of life motif, in brick relief, decorates the southern elevation) and compositions of small windows. Important openings are also uncomfortably crushed up underneath the eaves (they even look like Palladion Windows with the central arch cut off by the roof), lifted up into a massively top heavy inhabited attic, and pushed down to the lower ground floor, just peeping up above street level, again moving focus away from the unity of the building, the breaking up of which is completed with the off-centre entrance pavilion in Portland Stone.

Inside there are similar techniques of compositional juxtaposition and interpenetration. Each of the walls of every main room has its own classicaly or country-cottage inspired decorative scheme, which usually does not match up with the scheme on the neighbouring, or opposite wall of the same room, each of which houses a fireplace, a nook for sitting, or a wash stand, so that the room is not only visually broken up, but actually pulls activities towards each of its sides, as if each of the walls belong to separate rooms that were all turned inside out to make a new one.

In the larger rooms the recurring Palladian Window motif of the building is used to further divide the space by spanning the whole of one side of the room, partially separating, but also framing a subsidiary area.

These Palladian Windows appear all over the place, being a clear and constant reminder of the building's relationship to the past, a double sign of fidelity and freedom. They are played with in a way that couldnt say more clearly that while they are a classical trope, they are entirely at the service of the architects and the effects they want to achieve, being variously stretched, squashed, simplified and elaborated, depending on whether they are being used as dormer windows, partitions, doorways, furniture, and whether they are meant to convey a sense of grandiosity and weight, mark the depth of a wall, or celebrate a spatial transition. The same goes for all the historical allusions whether reffering to country vernacular, Queen Anne or Palladianism. Nothing is used slavishly or in an Academic manner, it is all reformed and reconstituted, transformed, distorted and joined together in a technique which treats History as a creative process, rather than as a sequence of either contextually contingent singularities, or as a set of virtually inviolable precedents.

The largest space, for concerts and music classes is a large barrel shaped room placed on the top of the building. Its height, and the high positioning of its windows, is how the architects got away with the large area of blank brick and render on the facade facing Tavistock Place. On three sides you have variations of their Palladian Windows, while the fourth has the stage which looks like a structure assembled within the great tubular room, a pile of cubes containing the stairs in and out, and a hidden raised choir stall, again composed as a distinctly separate entity within the overall space, and oddly looking like the front of the Sphinx with its head and shoulders lopped off by the ceiling. The overall effect is similar to the Refectories or Dormitories of Romanesque abbeys, where a large barrel vault often has staircases and a room built into them at one end, like this one here in Thoronet. Like most places in the building, The hall is reached by two small, winding staircases that emphasise the sense of arrival, and taken together, as you move around the building through all the thin top-lit corridors, through rooms that can only be accesed through other rooms, and other staircases, you lose your orientation, and it begins to feel like an endless three dimensional labyrinth.

In many of the places where there is a punctured thickness to the walls, there are seating areas, either looking like abstracted thrones, or benches. In the photo below, there is some glass in the arch above the nook, which is an internal window to a corridor above, a trick that is used in several places, and which lets a soft glow of natural light into the corridor, and lets the occupants of the room see people passing by.

Now, although -to my great disappointment- there are no inglenooks in the settlement, there are five lovely (that i saw) bright green fireplaces, each of which was designed by a different famous Arts and Crafts architect of the time, all of them invited by the young Arnold Dunbar Smith and Cecil Claude Brewer to adorn their first work with a little celebrity touch.

English Heritage never managed to definitively attribute them to their respective designers, so the game is left to us to discern the hand of Lethaby, Troup, Voysey, Dawber and Newton (and nice link to the great Norman Shaw there, as Newton trained at his office)

This is Arts & Crafts on a budget, and while most of it is really quite pared down and bare (a state of uncrafted nudity that doesnt suit this style, that relies so much on exquisite detailing, finish and craftsmanship, very well) there are some moments of beautiful joinery evenly scatted throughout, like the monumental cabinet below, with its squashed and stretched proportions.

The photo above is of one of the corridors that wind their way through the building. The window to the side opens to a room below, and there are Soane-like lanterns placed often enough that there is always a gentle indirect light in these tiny, long spaces, so that while you are disappearing further into the labyrinth, you are always aware of spaces adjoining yours, and a can see up and out of the building.

Wherever rooms open up into one another, there are small spaces that mark the event, above simply by cutting away the corner and opening a tiny window with a ledge onto it, which happens in a couple other places, and below with a pair of free standing columns, and little alcoves for displaying objects.

The same principle of celebrating, and using, the meeting of two spaces manifests itself in constant level changes between areas, normally only a step or two, but below rather grandly displayed as a little Michaelangelesque moment of one room literally spilling into another.

Its makes for a childlike experience of the building as a place to climb around, to peek around corners, in fact the effect of the breaking down of the building as a whole into so many small (and some large), composed spaces, and spaces within spaces, and winding stairs, corridors and rooms leading onto rooms, reminded me of how I used to experience large buildings as a child, never abstracting the place as a whole, as a coherent object, as I generally do now, but constantly lost in a cascade of separate moments that are discovered one after another, each almost forming a complete building of its own.

And to end -the North facade, again feeling like another building entirely to the west side facing the street, with the largest Palladian Window (the one in the music hall opposite the stage), and another strange set of tiny windows, that read instead as little solid bars, becoming a simplified entablature holding up the triumphal arch above. Go see it next September, its well worth the time.

G-A-Y in Leuven

2010-09-25T11:38:00.000+01:00

Stepping out of Leuven's jewelry-box town hall (which, if you dont have time can be visited in miniature at Mini-Europe, underneath Brussels' oversized Atomium), I was greeted by a bunch of giggling teenagers lying in the middle of the square in front of the Cathedral, together forming the word 'gay', out of a human typeface dressed in whatever clothes each of the members in each letter didnt mind throwing away the next day. They held the pose for quite some time, chattering to each other until they got cold, at which point they lined up in a row and began rolling over each other.

I doubt they were Leuven University's LGBT society, they were most likely using the naughty word as a way of waving their juvenile bums in the air at the still essentially Catholic nature of Leuven University proper, and its chief church.

It turned out that it was freshers weekend, and all the new students were being put through their initiations throughout the city centre, which was transformed by thousands of kids variously rolling eggs down steep hills with their noses, strapping themselves to each others' backs, chasing each other down busy streets, and -of course- drinking alot.

Escaping the pink underwear and fairy wings, I spent some time checking out Neutelings Riedijk's STUK cultural centre. A mix of buildings that has been woven together with new insertions, programmes, a small but still -in that office's manner- grand square and outdoor auditorium, and a meandering, picturesque little public path that pulls the activities through the site, and connects two parts of the city which are at very different heights.

Gargoyles and Exhibitionism in Santiago de Compostela

2010-09-11T11:49:00.000+01:00

Santiago de Compostela is the wettest place in Spain, and proud of it too, with the Architecture making a feature of large, numerous and prominent gargoyles and spouts like the ones above and below.

Apparently it is quite a fantastic experience to walk around town during a downpour, as torrents of water cascade down into the streets from these spouts like so many fountains. Of course the three days I spent there were unseasonably hot, with enrelentingly blue skies. Nonetheless I enjoyed imagining what it might be like, and looked up alot at the weighty layers of Churriguresque ornament that make up some of the cornices in the city centre, which together with their canon spouts tended to look like a fanciful fusion of the battleships and the architectural ornament from Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi's similarly inventive, copious and gigantic fresco of the Battle of Lepanto in Palazzo Colonna. Below is the Western facade of the Cathedral of the city, and site of pilgrimage for St James, whose gold and bejewelled bust you can hug after queuing for a few hours.

In front of it is a large square with one of the buildings facing it being a Spanish Renaissance Pilgrim guesthouse and hospital, on whose cornice I was enjoying some gargoyle spotting, since there are several large ones arrayed along its roofline, when I spotted this rather unecclesiastical gentleman below utilising his position to both attempt some auto-gratification as well as to present the hordes of spiritualy uplifted pilgrims who gather daily in the square with a lyrical transformation, via some deft figuration, of God's regular gift from the heaven's into what must be a positively transubstantiatory scatological installation.

It pleased me no end that somehow this Galician stone-mason, 450 years ago, had used the effect of elemental subsumption that happens in the kind of ornamental proliferation that santiago is encrusted with, to insert something as humorous as anything found in Pieter Bruegel's drunken peasant scenes. Similar statues, although usually much smaller, were common in Romanesque churches, ostensibly as unequivocal warnings to the great unwashed of the dangers of carnal sin, as catalogued in the thorough book Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches, but for one to be placed on a building of this late a period, in this much of a prominent position, and of this size (the more louche were generally confined to smaller churches along pilgrimage routes), there must have been either a particularly lewd Cardinal who explicitly requested it during procurement,

or else there was a roving Jean Genet figure amongst the numbers making up the stone-carvers guild, bent on celebrating through the bared body of a human being the ecstatic downward rush of water fast and away from the heavens to the soil, to turn the cathedral opposite upside down and inside out as his figure gazes reverently not upwards and eastwards, but is transfixed inwards, and projects downwards, gazing firmly at his own member whilst the length of his torso arks to release through the most profane of all body parts, away from the facade, the very stuff of life.

Four Flourishes From Lyon

2010-07-10T21:59:00.000+01:00

A genuine time capsule from 1992: the reception desk in a restaurant/hotel overlooking the city. The complex was built inside a 16th century monastery whose original frescoes and vaulting have been renovated inside in a riotous pink, aqua-marine, mirror, velour and marble take on what the renaissance meant for luxury clientele in the late eighties. It is aptly called the Villa Florentine after "Lyon's important links with that city throughout the Renaissance", with the building being "a tribute to that era". Its the Moore-like moments of madness that do it for me... at one point in a stairwell going to the toilets, a small army of entablatures peel away from the walls into the middle of the small space to become uplit chandeliers; Just visible behind them is a wall in the room adjacent that is covered in an abstracted black-and-white leopard print pattern, which rises up to a bright-baby-pink set of huge mouldings; and to top it off the staff are grumpy, and dressed up like characters from Babylon 5.

The main dome of Lyon's still functioning and huge Hotel Dieu.

Working much in the same capacity as London's Foundling Hospital the Hotel Dieu would have small turntables like the one above in several places in the city, for desperate parents to leave the children which they could not afford to take care of.

The interior of the Antiquites "Marilyn" on Rue Auguste Comte. The family who runs this shop quite clearly never get rid of anything, leading one to wonder how they know what is underneath all the piles of dolls and plates, whether things are simply compressing, cracking and folding into each other, forming little caves perfect for mice and 'borrowers', as stuff accumulates endlessly above. I wanted to see a vase that was somewhere up in the top left of the photo, leading to a scene where the lady attending the shop had to belly-crawl on top of all that porcelain, grab ahold of the shelves to lift herself up to the item, all the while telling me to keep holding up the mountain of plates with my hands and legs lest they all come tumbling down with her on top. Not the most efficient way of running the shop but quirky and memorable.

Electrical Orders and Tree Columns, an Israeli Electricity Sub-Station

2010-06-25T19:07:00.000+01:00

In the foothills of the new towers of the Kirya area of Tel Aviv there is this electricity substation, the more laissez faire city's PoMo reply to Jerusalem's solemn essay in origin editing, identity re-construction and aesthetic conflict resolution, the supreme courts complex by Ram Karmi and Ada Karmi-Melamede.

Whereas in the Jerusalem building every choice of material in the complex had to refer to a real and related geographic location, and every use of stylistic and symbolic quotation needed to be weighed carefully to be sure of its heavy symbolic significance in relation to the rest of the complex's elements, to its symbolic function, practical purpose and social resonance lest signals get crossed, and a tense public read it incorrectly; this little substation revels in the intractable mess it makes of its component references and materials, alternately looking like an inner-city prison, a temple, a casino entrance, a factory, and, well, an electricity substation. Its materiality is indeterminate at every point except for the steel gates, with the surfaces of the compound revealing themselves to be peeling in most places -the image of their substance coming off like spray-paint- whether or not they look like concrete or metal panelling from further away.

This building looks like a plastic-toy stage set with multiple audiences in mind (although its pathos is heightened by being devoid of any real audience, being as it is in a bleak and deserted post-market-liberalisation part of town), and in a world where almost any shape and colour can be made from petroleum based plastic products, with miniature buildings, toy space stations, medical equipment and shoes being formed from the same stuff, negating the importance of the origin of a material, as well as of the link to the forms which that material once necessarily took, and replacing that importance with the supremacy of the qualities and effects derived from that original material's transformation, and the allusive power of the form it finally takes, this little mess is an architectural reach in the direction of the power of the material-less toy. It is also oddly contextual with its peeling paint and abundance of totally arbitrary symbols, fitting in with Tel Aviv's 1920s and 30s modernist "Bauhaus" apartment blocks where shapes surge like steam liners, and desperately attempt to look like skyscrapers, whilst flaking away their plaster (meant to look like concrete) and revealing their underlying brick, breeze-block and gravel structures (meant to be reinforced concrete dom-ino).

Its abundance of formal devices from its shifted grids to its "electricity orders", and its many faces as a visually playful urban object are unfortunately, like alot of buildings around it, means without any ends. It all seems like a lot of hard work for a project that got built, but turned out to have no client except a couple of IEC employees, and the occasional architecture geek with a Canon. The space between the body of the offices and the street could have contained a lotto stall, a falafel outlet, anything that might have brought a bit of life to all the bizarre conceits, giving them more substance and enmeshing them in the everyday life of the area, although the fault might lie with the failure of the area as a contemporary urban development, being unable as it is to provide a sufficient flow of people throughout the week to keep shops and businesses alive. It is a bit like a built-in ornamental clock I once saw in a Covent Garden backyard, sitting at the top of a fire escape (which i believe was supposed to make the fire-escape tower look like a mini big-ben of sorts), which the builders had never bothered to put arms into, probably because they realised whilst installing it that it was an attempt at monumentality, without an audience for the architectural event.

Most of the buildings in the area have a similar feeling to them, but none has had so much effort put into its design, the others being mostly faceted or curving curtain-walled office towers, and whilst gates stop anyone entering the interior of the substation, and the hum of electricity passing over transistors keeps the site empty of programme and activity, at least it generously offers up its visual stimuli to anyone who cares to notice it, marking itself in whatever public space there is between the highway and the security-guarded office towers.

Anyone can walk up to it, and hopefully one day it will be turned into a complex used for various activities, sports or shopping etc, and stand in opposition to the new generation of buildings developing slightly further up the same road, exemplified by the Yoo towers by Phillipe Starck (lobby above, and part of the nightmarish Tzameret Park Luxury High-Rise District), where all elevations facing the city are reduced to joyless whitewash, and all design effort and money is lavished on the private space of the heavily guarded interiors, rendering the feeling of an elite form of luxury that is exclusive and hidden, all the more acute (and valuable). In a typical Starck tactic the lobby of the Yoo towers are hidden behind veiled curtains that only give glimpses of the dripping interior, and security guards that are dressed like bouncers make residents feel special and welcome, as anyone else who is a member of the general public is made decidedly unwelcome. All facilities that one could need are within the complex from convenience store to gym and health clinic, leaving the sign at the entrance to the compound ringing in one's ears like a sarcastic slap: "To Live In The Heart Of Tel Aviv". Below is a paired image, on the left is the street across the road from the Tzameret Development, with its open ground floors, adhering to the old city code, open to anyone, its plots densely packed with windows opening directly onto the pavement and passers-by, and on the right is one of the two monitored entrances to the towers, with its huge distances between plots, no relationship between public space and the interiors of apartments, and a windswept isolation that was only punctuated when I visited by the distant sound of a disembodied fight between a couple up in one of the higher floors, that sounded like it was getting rather violent; the squawking of some women and a couple of men who, dressed like Pamela Andersons and Russian gangsters respectively, were gawking at the enviable future they had come to admire; and the quiet rustling and door slamming of two men who appeared to be throwing unwanted kittens into a skip.

An Unfinished Ruin in Savyon, Israel

2010-05-05T07:09:00.000+01:00

A large unfinished house in Savyon, a wealthy suburb in the Gush-Dan area of Israel. Savyon was built in the 50s as a collection of medium sized houses in large gardens, and has since developed into a showcase similar to London's Bishops Avenue, where, through an influx of money from parts of the world where aesthetic signals are mixed with an unusually audacious and un-reflective eagerness, homes grow into caricatures of status, organised around the pomp of their facades, and the music-video kitsch of their pool-sides.

While development has usually led to either faux-palace fronts, with badly made colonnades, or to obese New Mexico style adobe cubes, looking like brochures for luxury tropical resorts, there is this strange pile, not quite fitting in, that has sat regally rotting in one of the main streets for about six years.

Looking like one of Saddam's smaller attempts at architecture, after a missile strike, it was apparently built by a Georgian (or Kazakh, or Russian...) tycoon who, suffering from a mix of paranoia, bad taste and delusions of greatness, demanded that it be built as solidly as a bunker, and -one guesses- as palatial as, well perhaps less palladio and more Naboo.

Having spent alot of money pouring all that concrete into all those complicated forms, which I imagine were to last forever, it turned out that the owner's dreams came up against the fact that he had over-built the area that was zoned for construction on the plot. After spending so much building it, and the structure being so thoroughly monolithic (bunker-like basements included), it proved beyond his finances to demolishes it, let alone start again, and so it sits there, slowly rotting, and I imagine being well used by teenagers and kids.

A combination of the Edifice Complex, planning law, cheekiness and bad taste here managed to produce a quite fascinating place that simultaneously has the romantic allure of the modern ruin, like all those unfinished Dom-ino frames scattering Greece's landscape, the exotic strangeness, and mixed language, of new luxury architecture in Central Asia, as well as the weighty trace of implied defence and aggression that its interior resemblance to a bunker produces.

11 Flourishes From February and March

2010-03-11T09:35:00.000Z

^ Four concrete posts on Gloucester Avenue, Camden

^ Closing Mobile Phone shop on Oxford Street

^ Split pediment board, Wardour Street, Soho

^ Primark Palace, Oxford Street

^ Toaster, friend's house, Clapham Junction

^ Art-Deco painted steel columns, Picadilly Circus Station

^ Pergola terminating a facade, with a little rickety staircase for access, Tottenham Court Road

^ High-Pomo axis, Poland Street, Soho

^ Hair, Riflemaker Gallery, Beak Street, Soho

^ Bed, Hampton Court Palace, Surbiton, Surrey

^ Storage Room (with bacteria killing UV lights), China Town

Op-Art Architecture: The Victor Vasarely Foundation

2010-03-08T08:50:00.000Z

Next to a business park, by a motorway, on the outskirts of Aix-En-Provence stands the somewhat dilapidated Victor Vasarely Foundation, a giant shed of a building surrounded by struggling lawns and a rather forlorn looking 'reflecting' pond that looks like a paddling pool from Pripyat.

Victor Vasarely, helped along by his origins in graphic design, had always believed in there being a natural relationship between Op-art and architecture. He managed some other experiments on that scale, like "Le Ciel, Le Mer, La Terre' in Monaco, but here, in his own foundation he set out to start exploring the relationship between Op-Art and Architectural Space. In the strong Provencal sunlight the facade is on first glance strangely flattened, but starts to alternately jump out and recede from you, depending on how long you look at its black or white elements. It is a subtle, tentative breaking down of form in space, via our optical perception, later directly picked up in more flamboyant, but entirely derivative fashion by Fernando Peixoto's Brazilian towers.

The plan of the building is a collection of Hexagons, the corners of which are cut off (seen below), an omission which acts as circulation, and links the spaces together. Because of the missing corners, when standing in one of the tall hexagonal rooms, you can always see through to several other rooms at the same time, and like colour-drift within an op-art painting, the large installations in the other rooms mingle at the edges of your vision with the colours and patterns directly in front of you, affecting one another and concentrating detail at the periphery. This overlaying turns spatial depth, and perspectival scale, into methods of enriching the experience of moving through the place into a chromatic kaleidoscope that shifts depending on what is closer, further away, at the periphery, or in the centre.

The division between the form of the space (the extruded hexagons), and the planes on which the works are placed (the surfaces defining the edges of the hexagons), acts as a 3 dimensional structure of relationships between the installations. The arrangement adds a scale of optical structure that functions similarly to the grids and radial organisations in Vasarely's individual compositions, but here with whole compositions taking on the roles normaly held by blocks of one or two colours. The dynamics of chromatic and optical movement in his paintings, which is brought about by the shifting of the eye across patterned and distorted 2 dimensional surfaces, is here being embedded within a broader spatial choreography that uses the roaming of the body, together with the wandering of the gaze, to turn his aptitude for coruscating effect into a more bodily, immersive experience.

The form of the space itself, however, always remains an agent of structure, always stays at the level of the unfilled, undistorded grid that lies behind the agents of effect, ordering and setting relations between what is within itself, but never quite taking part.

But there are great moments, like the one above, where there is a hint of what it might have been like if Vasarely had totaly broken out, with his optical distortions, from the two dimensional (transforming the body of the spaces themselves), and launched into a deeper experimentation into the relationship, often tense, and perhaps too tightly defined in the foundation building, between form, pattern and colour. There is an antinomy between the three, often extrematised when it comes to architecture, where they each seem to have worlds unto themselves, which seem irreconcilable, with clear internal logics that completely contradict one another. But occasionaly, when they come together, the most gorgeous things can happen. Perhaps Vasarely, like all the Op-artists, was trying to be too scientific about his work, and perhaps by the time his meticulous research reached the topic of form, there was no time left for the life-time's worth of painstaking analysis that he would have demanded for it from himself; and so what we are left with is a proto-Op-Art Architecture, a careful composition of dizzying 2dimensional planes, set off by the occasional sculpture, which hints at the fun that might have been; and everything together, architecture, paintings and all, falling apart, peeling away.

Although the building is not in the best of conditions, at least it is open, which it hadnt been for some time in the 1990s, following the 12 year presidency of the Foundation by Charles Debbasch, a French Technocrat who allowed it to fall in to disrepair whilst embezzling funds and stealing artworks, crimes which led to his firing, subsequent flight from France, and which eventually helped fund a coup in the Republic of Togo, in which he took part, and consequently now enjoys a senior government position in the West African state (perhaps he just cant stay away from strident patterns). It wasnt just him, but apparently also many members of the Vasarely progeny stole from the collection, one even being arrested on the job in a storage facility in Chicago, leading to court battles and a final decision that his grandson Pierre Vasarely take control of the estate, which is now being slowly (very slowly) rejuvenated.

Welcome To London

2010-03-07T09:52:00.000Z

This great little piece of public ornament is now semi-permanently gracing the north-western entrance to Leicester Square.

Warning of the amorphous and shadowy presence of some sort of unspecific, generalised "criminiality", out to get whatever you consider to be valuable in the space between your flesh and your outermost pocket, the sign (one guesses) is supposed to increase the reach and efficiency of the law through public awareness and vigilance. But because it looks like it has been hastily left by the retreating side in a battle of which there are no traces, like an apologetic warning to initiate self-policing from the government of some occupying power being forced to withdraw, instead of instilling communal self-policing and confidence it is unintentionally pathetic.

It doesnt have the sinister gaze of the discrete observer that shrouds cctv cameras with their very particular aura of malignant control, and singular purpose; instead it has the rather sad aspect that comes from a sign which is attempting to do something as serious as control criminality, but is having to nonetheless balance this with the role of needing to welcome people to an area, to somehow positively represent that area, to efface itself at the same time as pronouncing itself, hence the "WELCOME TO LEICESTER SQUARE", then the dire warnings, put as neutraly as possible, like the traffic-jam signs on motorways that tell you to drive carefully when there is no information to relay, and finally the ambiguous "HAVE A SAFE NIGHT", not "HAVE A LOVELY NIGHT" or "MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A SAFE NIGHT OR ELSE: ITS UP TO YOU!", but the rather sweetly confused median. One feels for the sign, it doesnt know what it is, it is pathetic, and Kawai, sweet.

I wonder whether it ever has other messages posted on it from different governmental depts or the GLA, perhaps like "Welcome to leicester square; the food served in some establishments here has been proven to be detrimental to your health; Order with caution; Have a healthy evening".

Because there is something so forlorn about the wheeled-in sign, with its little guardian sentry rails that allow it to conform to Health and Safety regs, and its confused task, I wonder if it could be brought to life and given its own sad, pleading personality, like a very British Marvin The Paranoid Android in another guise, or a more down-to-earth, london 2010 version of the Highway sign in LA Story that instead of helping out like a post-modern benevolent techno-god, here looks back at you from the works of man and offers up a confused and pitiful mirror, in LED and aluminium, for your own relationship to the city around you.

Eduardo Paolozzi Mosaics at Tottenham Court Road Tube Station

2010-02-28T16:58:00.000Z

On the eve of Tottenham Court Road Tube Station's demise (it is being redeveloped into one of the Major Crossrail Stations), I have made this photo tour of the Mosaics that alot of its interior is covered with, designed by Eduardo Paolozzi's Munich studio in three phases in the 1980s. These mosaics have graced my journeys through this station for the past 10 years, and together with the mind-blowing tiling of the tunnels, has added an unintrusively jubilant, and suitably superficial edge to the dowdy patina and standard spaces of this otherwise unremarkable station.

Entrance from Tottenham Court Road

The inside of all that is left of the whole block on the south side of St Giles' Circus (going down to the ticket hall) that used to contain the Astoria, Metro and the Ghetto, as well as that staple of early saturday morning Doners and fish n' chips, Dionysus.

The entrance to the descent of the three escalators from the tiny, low ticket hall is framed by this double arcade of bright primary patterns, through which you enter the commute home as if going into some sort of flamboyant, underground basilica.

The Central Line Mosaics, completed in 1982, are all candy-coloured exuberance, as if the mosaic artists had been weaving a tribal fabric for the kingdom of Soho and Bloomsbury above, pouncing out of the walls like banners in a parade.

More After The Break...

Paolozzi was involved in the early breathings of pop in the UK, and while alot of his later work is critical, uncertain, quite profoundly questioning, here the mosaics are decorative in the best sense of the word: they pick up traces of place and atmosphere, and reconfigure them into a palette that paints the surfaces which contain the place's actions and life with a veneer of its own concentrated strengths. And all this done with a margin of abstraction that places it slightly below the wavelength of direct communication (unlike the images of ancient artefacts from the BM in Holborn station, or the tromp l'oeils of paintings in the Tate at Pimlico, basically advertising), that sits it resolutely in the background, in the thin but vital zone between the form of the space and the attention of its occupants.

At the bottom of the escalators, just before the tunnel to the Central Line, is the Rotunda. A strange place, seemingly without a purpose (it only has an in, and an out, on axis with one another, so why not a straight tunnel like everywhere else in the station?), but with a collection of the most figurative of all the mosaics. These were the last to be designed and have clear, if slightly fragmented references, a bit like paolozzis portrait sculptures, in opposition to the more textural approach in the rest of the place (the bees seen in photos above are from the same phase).

Strange and impossible mechanical devices refer to the wild inventions of the Architectural Association around the corner, to which paolozzi had affiliations going back to the Independent Group and its exhibitions Parallel of Life and Art in 1953 and This is tomorrow in 1956, mechanized chickens reffering to the proliferation of fast food establishments above, and angry looking masks possibly coming from the BM's ethnographic displays. Its a nice space, especially with the heavy square tube of lighting hanging from the reflective slats of stainless steel, but I prefer the other mosaics that are more recessive.

The Northern Line (my native platforms) are more muted, with the Northbound platform (image below) being dominated by greys, with hints of lime green, blues and reds.

The southbound platforms are bolder, with their geometries standing out in sharper relief from the strong binary use of black and white.

And between the areas covered in mosaic are suitably surreal corridors and tunnels decked out in op-art like grids of off-white elongated tiles and black mortar, that flicker moiree-like as you walk down them.

And as you leave Paolozzi's dirty but bright underground world, you rise up through the other side of his double-arcade, with this end's openings having the triumphant proportions of a Roman Arch.

I dont know what will happen to the mosaics, but I remember reading somewhere that LU is commited to incorporating at least some of them into the new super-station. They wont have the same intimate specificity that they have now, designed as they were perfectly for every corner and curve of the station, and they might look a little lost and forlorn in the gleaming vastness of all the huge new spaces, but at least there will be something to remember what was there before. Or on that note, perhaps they should be broken up, and given in pieces to all the people who actually enjoyed them as they passed through the station everyday, and will give them a new, and equally comfortable and specific home, to turn up in some future decade on Antiques roadshow, in a pile of much-loved things left to a grandchild by his grandmother.

Donuts, Baguettes and Nineties Pop Stars

2010-01-25T06:34:00.001Z

A couple of signs from Soho. Firstly one that sports a message that I wouldnt envy any graphics to have to convey in our current organic-fair-trade-minded delirium. In fact its just next to the Third Space, the uber trendy gym attended by no less than Madonna, and around the corner from the wildly expensive Organic super market Fresh n Wild, but by virtue of being a few metres closer to the student-trip tourism of Picadilly Circus, it stands a fighting chance for customers against image dinosaurs like KFC, Garfunkels and Adam's Ribs. I however, even though I walk past it probably every other day, had never noticed it as I generaly switch off my observation skills as I pass down from Brewer Street into the maelstrom that is the Circus, and only ever turn them back on again either once in the tube station (a very beautiful one I might add), or have crossed over into Lower Regent Street, past Lillywhites.

So I had missed the unique combined selling point that is this fast food joint which peddles DONUTS & BAGUETTES. It is like a couple of friends sat down, looked at how many student groups would be flocking past the site everyday (it sat opposite what was London's largest budget hotel until it was demolished recently), and, pointing out to one another that most would be coming from either North America or Europe, thought to cover the two regoins with respectively pan-continental dough-products: donuts AND baguettes; win win. Sealed with a snazzy looking dough-like font on contrasting candy-coloured background, in front of a pattern of abstracted op-art dough balls, lit by neon, the message zings in mighty defiance to the vast luxury hotel and retail project going up across the road, in place of the grand old Regent Palace Hotel.

Secondly, just above Cafe Nero at the start of Hanway Place, on the north side of Oxford Street (also being mightily redeveloped), there is an office of some sorts that has decided to print out a larger-than-life sized cardboard cutout of Brian Harvey, of East 17 fame, at his skinniest, and place it just behind the bay window, so that he leers over Soho St across the road, glowing with a weird neon halo from behind, and lit occasionaly with strobe-like flashes from the buses driving in the road running alongside him. The office seems to be empty apart from him. Perhaps they left one last resident to stand in protest as yet another block gets requisitioned for demolition by Crossrail? Oh well, "Let It Rain".

Paris Cafe

2009-11-28T12:38:00.000Z

A Boulangerie/Cafe called "Au Pain Bien Cuit", at 111 Boulevard Hausmann in the 8th. We had just left the Musee Jaquemart Andre, and this shop provided a perfect counterbalance to that museum's Second Empire grandeur.

Brilliant combination of blue-veined marble-like laminate, red brick, yellow paint, and a host of catering trolleys and oven trays scattered between and over every surface.

While also being full of pictures and mementos of the past, mostly featuring an apparently absent baker who I presume started the place, and who you can see in the middle of the photo below (which was sitting on the lower shelf of a trolley next to our table), recieving the First Prize in the "Prix De La Baguette Parisienne" in 1997.

The Kalandeberg Fountain

2009-11-02T15:37:00.000Z

In a small square, Kalandeberg, in the old city centre of Ghent, Flanders, there is this fountain that I make a bee-line to whenever I get to visit that city. Surrounded by boutiques in what I presume are mostly death-masked buildings, faced by the outdoor seating of a Pain Quotidien, pressed to one side of the oblong lozenge that is the open space in which it sits, unassumingly silhouetted against the glow of a MaxMara outlet behind it, the fountain is surrounded by cracked concrete bollards, is grimy, quite small, and is obviously tilting and subsiding to one side since the water from its basin uniformly falls down into its lower catchment at one edge. Even the sound of its splashing is normally -during the day- lost under the romping screech of an accordian playing old neapolitan tunes for the benefit of passing shoppers.

Please go here for the full video as blogger cuts its width in half on this blog.

However for me it commands the square, and, along with George Minne's (unfortunately temporarily removed) fountain of the kneeling youths,

George Minne's Fountain of The Kneeling Youths

marks the two poles of that sophisticated assurance which saturates Ghent in its own unique atmosphere of apparently frozen composure; a composure not of elegant display, rather the opposite, of a very spare and restrained matter-of-factness, in which everything from its infrastructure to its history, its architecture and aesthetics has been somehow pragmatised, somehow ironed free of all contradiction and doubt before they have been implemented and installed (or renovated).

Everything is so confidently neat, and yet nothing feels forced, nothing artificial. It is a calibrated smoothness that seems to be balanced by, on the one hand, little un-problematic flourishes of sentimental exuberance and sensual delight, from the city's chocolates to the vivid ceramics on its town houses, and on the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by studied transgressions, by the precise and pointful constructs of the city's large art school, and the contents of its institutional art museums, which evocatively contravene and disturb the smooth trajectory of the rest of the city centre, perhaps therapeuticaly providing an outer edge for the bored to indulge themselves and their speculations in. Whilst Minne's fountain, with its idealised, sexualised, emaciated dream of suspended youth sits right at the heart of the city as its prime example of the second pole of Ghent's aesthetics, asking questions, demanding attention, and always deeply moving, the Kalandeberg fountain, resting in its little out-of-the-way square, is the period totem-pole icon of the city's little whimsical decorations, its tasty indulgences.

Never perfectly proportioned, the whole fountain is oddly balanced. But oddly balanced in an endearing way, like a house that has been designed to look cosey by resembling an old tumble-down farmouse, or to look like a building that has grown in an inexplicable, but happily picturesque fashion over time. It is a warm living room from the turn of the 19th Century compressed and piled up into an ornament for the city.

The column is too small, it is squat and inelegant; the basin and its feet are far too large and rise up too high; the urn is too high and spouts its water feebly, from four tiny spouts which can do nothing to stop the water being carried away by the wind. But the manner by which the elements have been joined together, by simple stacking, give them the unity of a still life, of a small collection, of a side table packed with objects placed on lace, and the materials with which they have been made, pink stone, alabaster, copper and sandstone, make them all look edible, delicious to look at as well as sweet.

And the sculpture on which the column rests is just as sacharine, with an adorable dog caught in a perpetual chase around the circumference of the fountain after a fowl, a goose, and a duck. It is a sculpture of a kind with the sort of watercolours that would hang in any number of living rooms depicting hunting scenes, views of forests, a day out in country pastures; and the ornaments on the urn, column, basin and base are also of the sort that would decorate any number of Edwardian objects in any amount of living rooms, with their heavy, unmistakeable forms and clear, direct symbolism.

It is not an object for contemplation, and can hardly be called a relevant object for the city today, and yet, like Proust's Madeleine, it seems to be a little portal into tastes that encompassed a style and way of living whose residues, like the remnants of Horta in Brussels, have mostly been flattened out in the current city, while their current equivalents -the median household's patch-up of ikea and retro bric-a-brac- lack a comparable physical representative.

Architectural Conversations, Allusions and Polychromy in Place De La Concorde

2009-10-29T18:59:00.000Z

Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris is framed on all its sides by national landmarks: on one the Hotel Crillon, a luxury hotel once favoured by Marie Antoinette, swimming in white and honey coloured marbles and gilding, was, the few times I walked past it, appropriately adorned by its automotive equivalent, a walrus-like white and gold Rolls Royce; the other sides respectively accomodating the National Assembly (previously the Palais Bourbon), the beginning of the Champs Elysees, and the Tuileries Gardens.

The decorative scheme of this vast Place, designed by the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorf, and including two large fountains and a marching border of Rostral Columns, resembles more the carefuly considered and decorous elegance of a Parisian dining table than a European Square. Balancing exotic motifs and a rich, uniform colouring of sea-green highlighted with gilding, the fountains and columns manage to maintain all the allusions to ancient Rome of the high Empire style, but without any of its drum-beating pomp and bellicose, self satisfied profusion of clashing forms and colours.

Place de la Concorde has all the grandeur of a witty feminine display that at once seduces and beguiles you with its harmoniously resolved conceits, delivered with an easy and languorous tone, while slipping through an underlying message of strength and resolute confidence. There is a conversation going on between the Crillon, Assembly, Tuileries and Champs Elysees, and it is happening over the Place, whose arrangement of emerald items adorn, frame and conduct their discussion as a dinner service both generates an atmosphere and helps choreograph the sequential unfolding of an evening's events.

Hittorf was a great proponent of Polychromy in Architecture, fighting his ground against the "purists" in the Beaux-Arts after discovering that ancient Greek Temples had been heavily coloured. This led to the deep green ground of the Concorde, and the intended richness of colour in St Vincent de Paul, which, unfortunately, was not completed to his saturated designs.

St Vincent de Paul

Although, partly inspired by Hittorf's discoveries and all the dazzling and mysterious aesthetic splendour of the ancient world they implied, just around the corner you can visit the Atelier of Gustave Moreau, where there is more than enough painterly recreations of strange, bejewelled, encrusted and coloured worlds both to make you want to re-read Flaubert's Salammbo and Herodias, and to make up for Hittorf's unfinished masterpiece.

Detail of Salome by Gustave Moreau

Even today most discussions in architecture about colour have to be formed as apologias, as if such an indulgence were something that must be defended. In the nineteenth century, after Hittorf's discoveries, at least architects had the ever-expansive precedent of the classical world to cite as justification, with evidence ever increasingly proving the predominance of pigment in the ancient meditteranean, confounded by the ongoing excavations in Pompeii and the unearthing of its interiors that were as red as pottery and as warm as flesh. Joseph Rykwert, in his article the Polychromy of Greek Temples in edition 2 of Terazzo, even goes so far as to say that the Greeks never even considered leaving white surfaces bare (naked in their eyes), only leaving yellowish stones like Tufa or Poros without treatment, and if marble, covering it with stucco -the colour of sunlight, or at the very least staining it in a Saffron emulsion. Today however there are no such precedents to cite, and the seductive allure of pigmentation seems forever either stuck in the supporting, diagrammatic role of spatial and structural differentiation, or else as a guilty, irrational pleasure, that because of its powerful and direct appeal to the senses, can be used, but in a tightly controlled and restrained fashion, lest it swamp the practical and cerebral core of Building.

capital from stadium entrance in Olympia, by Ernst Curtius and Friedrich Adler 1896

Speaking of ancient allusion and precedent, the columnar lamposts in the Concorde, although refined and delicate, refer to an ancient tradition both imperial and antagonistic. Under all the civility of Hittorf's design, there is both the earthiness inherent in the depths of his greens, and the base swagger of the unapologeticaly triumphant: the lamposts are a rare (at the time) reinstatement of an ancient Roman tradition/motif, the nautical equivalent of their Triumphal Arches through which a returning army would pass in celebration of a conquest with its spoils, both human and financial.

Ancient ships used to have huge brass rams at their fronts, which were their main form of attack. They would speed as fast as possible into their enemy, ploughing into its side and hoping to break the other vessel in two. Following an important naval victory against the Etruscans (the first recorded) in 338BC, at Anzio, the Romans severed the Rams from the surviving Etruscan ships and attached them to walls in the Comitium, a gathering place in the Forum, to declare the vanquishing of the enemy fleet.

Reconstruction of the Rams in the Comitio

In 260BC, following a defeat of the Carthaginian fleet, the Romans erected a column in the Comitio onto which the captured Rams (also known as Rostra) were attached, creating a stand-alone monument, and a new form of column, embodying naval might and prowess, now known as a Rostral Column.

The position of a Rostrum on an ancient ship, and on a Rostral Column

After the battle of Actium, in which the Romans devastated Antony and Cleopatra's fleet, the Rostral Column was moved to a large Altar which developed into a platform from where speakers would address crowds at the Forum (hence the word Rostrum now also meaning a place from where public speakers address a crowd), sealing its position at the heart first of the Republic, and later of the Empire, meaning its form and symbolic meaning have survived to this day via classical interventions in our cities created by architects like Hittorf, and commemorating events as varied as the Battle of Lepanto, and the desire of Louis-Phillipe to imply some kind of imperial glory during his relatively morbund reign (during which the square in its current form was commsioned).

And to conclude on an entirely whimsical note that returns to the dining table, I finaly managed to purchase in Paris this figure of Paris offering his golden Apple to Aphrodite, an act inspired by voluptuosness and passion, but pregnant with the saga of an epic war and which here, in this little piece of porcelain, was compressed by the taste of the eighteenth century into a charming ornament for the desert service, whose purpose was to please the eye, and to direct conversation in case there happened to be a dearth of topics.

Geneva's Time and Timelessness

2009-10-03T14:28:00.000+01:00

Departures Hall

The old terminal of the city’s airport is an essay in well proportioned, precisely detailed, slick high modernism, of the sort that in any other country would either be so hidden by a grimy cake of ill considered additions, and a total lack of cosmetic maintenance, that its original virtues would be entirely submerged; or else would have been lovingly rediscovered, restored, and elevated to a higher plane of architectural existence by the status of historical idol-hood that is conferred on a building together with the ‘heritage’ budget for its restoration.

Facade of Main Terminal Building

Elsewhere the building would have been through several cycles, through which it would have suffered and been reborn, or at least seen itself be modified and altered repeatedly to accommodate evolving circumstances, the place would have been marked by time, but this building seems totally frozen at the moment of its inception, perfectly maintained on the cusp of the 1970s, unchanged except for a few television screens for displaying arrival times, that look as if they are from the 80s. It doesn’t have the totally contemporary bright-shiny-modernity of the renovated Royal Festival Hall (that impossibly idealised past newness, like aggressive plastic surgery), but is instead a slightly faded form in whose lack of lustre, but abundance of intact atmosphere, can be read a consideration and awareness of aging and decay that is far more consistent, perhaps frighteningly so (like embalming at birth) and far less sentimental than our fitful, and guilty, reconstructions of buildings raped by inconsideration. In this rigorously petrified architecture, which seems to deny time, there are endless parades of posters and advertisements for luxury watches, from the whole gamut of manufacturers in the area (you can see two in the right of the first photo) from Audemars Piguet to Baume et Mercier and Rolex.

Advertisment for a luxury watch in Geneva Airport

These adverts seem to cluster into three groups, those that draw lines of reassurance from the past into our present, and by implication into a comfortably recognisable future; those that assure timeless worth through the scarcity value of the materials from which they are constructed; and those that thrust with the confidence and bravura of jet-engines, or fast cars, into a positively exciting future. The designs follow suit, with the first type all looking like bizarrely overcomplicated Victorian scientific devices (usually with a hint to the nautical) that I would have thought only Hollywood, or Tim Burton, could conceive of; the second type forming themselves as miniature display cases designed to show off their burden of diamonds or even, as above, their weight of genuine moon dust; and the third uniformly composed of two ingredients -although at varying quantities, these being the angular implication of movement and speed taken from the silhouette of a stealth fighter, and the massive punch and carved strength taken from the jutting profile of a tank.

With all of these posters, and in the building itself, there is a distinct lack of the kind of novelty and newness which was so prevalent in the Heathrow that I had just left. Even the posters of futuristic looking watches looked terribly obvious, old somehow, completely without any forms that might surprise, even in the slightest way. They are all about circumventing time, whether by being sure of the future through your connection with the past, through the assurance of a ‘timeless’ quantitative value, or through the confidence of a masculine arrogance; and all perfectly framed within a building that seems to be a fulfilment of all their promises, a fossilized but living nexus, unchanged in all its main elements, cared for and maintained as if it were intrinsically valuable, and still looking to a bright future from back at the apogee of the modern traveller’s glamorous past.

Office building on the lake front

It was by parts thrilling and sad, I felt as if I were Donald Draper in MadMen visiting the city back in the day, bronze door handles, dapper suits and all, and the illusion only gets stronger if you are visiting as briefly as I did, and only have time for a momentary walk around the city, because its waterfront is clad in exquisitely maintained modern palaces from the same period, perfect boxes of Gordon Bunshaft slickness arrayed around the lake and the river as if they were counting down the days to their inception. Those buildings were thrilling, I could imagine the whole place like a little Florence of the 60s, but then accompanying these buildings wasn’t any art, decoration, invention or even glamour, just adverts and products like the kind below. Lots of little timelessnesses that can be melted down, and would either still hold their value, or be worth even more.

Carlo Scarpalike

2009-09-17T20:05:00.000+01:00

Some pictures of a couple of buildings by an architect in Provence, which we saw in Aix and Avignon, and who clearly wanted a bit of "Scarpa" in his works.

School in Avignon, unknown architect

The school above, which is in the old centre of Avignon, is difficult to find anything but painful,

Banco Popolare Di Verona, Carlo Scarpa

however the apartment building below in Aix, is quite an odd pleasure.

Apartment building in Aix-en-Provence, unknown architect

Walking around, and getting quite lost in the winding alleys of Aix, it was fun to have this building, bedecked with its little scarpa-esque ornaments, like cheap, but colourful costume jewelry thrown onto the most average of bodices, popping up every half an hour or so. It grounded that part of the town for us with the intimation of a sweet story about a young, provincial architect, visiting italy on a study holiday, and having been deeply moved by the Banca Popolare building, the Querini Stampalia, and the Olivetti Showroom, and considering it his personal mission to bring a little something of that magic back to provence.

There was another building around the corner, much more recent, more restrained, and with a rather enlarged budget. It was in effect a handsomely proportioned French Town House, built in stone, but with hugely over articulated window frames, that geometrically followed through into the cornice lines, rendered in the typical stairlike, staggered, Scarpa profile. It was however definitevely less endearing for being so well finished, and so elegantly proportioned.