“A lot of professional philosophers architects lack the imagination required to think about what it’s like not to understand something. Some have got into a complacent habit of speaking to each other in a kind of technical language, which is almost at times the avoidance of doing philosophy architecture. They’re part of a culture of people who always say the same things and make the same moves: just making finer and finer discriminations between whether they’re a particular kind of materialist or a particular kind of functionalist. People stake out little claims. When faced with the need to explain what they’re doing and why it should be of interest to anyone at all outside of that culture, many flounder.

“Not the best ones, interestingly. The really significant philosophers architects are able to explain with superb clarity precisely what it is that matters about a topic. Not just for others with similar interests but for anybody who might be concerned with philosophy architecture at all. Weaker philosophers architects hide behind a series of coded nods and winks to each other. This often betrays a lack of clarity of thought.”

I can also recommend the most recent episode on analytic vs continental thinking for a similar what-if-this-were-about-architecture exercise.

Housed in the Black Maria installation at St Martin’s by Richard Wentworth/GRUPPE we were split into eager registrants who’d secured a ‘seat’ and lazy laggards who just turned up to freeload by taking a chair outside the installation and behind the projection screen. Proceedings get underway with the barrier between us raised and the talk show hosts/guests in the middle, then at the appointed moment when sufficient teasing has taken place, the screen falls (to the sound of a jet aircraft landing) and we become the privileged few allowed sole rights to the speaker’s attention and slides that are the right way round, whilst the rest get only sound piped through speakers and reversed images and text. It’s a privilege that is later slightly sullied by the numbness of our arses as they complain about the unforgiving plywood steps we’re sitting on. The fact that Richard Wentworth himself chose to sit on the chairs outside should have told us something perhaps.

It’s a beautiful thing though, and perhaps the very embodiment of what would during the evening be discussed as the conflict between the teaching of craft and ethics. Carefully crafted as it is to disrupt the usual ethics of oratory; thereby straddling both concepts perfectly.

The evening is introduced by Shumi Bose and the speakers are described as one qualified architect (Till) and two people who inhabit the ‘extended field of architecture’ (Hill and Vanstiphout). It’s this extended field that is of course the primary focus for the evening and a topic ripe for exploration in the UK at the moment given the widely discussed/lamented state of the profession and it’s utter lack of direction or worth. How does a mindful awareness of this extended field allow architecture to work within, against or for institutions?

Here are some (crudely paraphrased) sound bites and notes from each:

Jeremy Till – institutional irritant

1) provides a short intro and begins by reading the founding definition of the RIBA (quoted in his book Architecture Depends), part of which can be paraphrased thus: ‘architects are to be the arbiters of taste’ and he then states that this institute’s position is only legitimised by the support of other institutes i.e. universities.

2) he criticises architecture for becoming a spatial projection of imagination (or does he? see footnote)

3) acknowledging his position in the large institute of St Martin’s he describes himself as the institutional irritant that seeks to disrupts from within, but acknowledges that the more effective position may be on the outside

Wouter Vanstiphout – architect as figurehead

4) describing background and past work Wouter talks of his Design as Politics course

5) which leads to later studies on the politics of urban riots and the question of whether the fabric of the city itself is an accessory to the violence with the architect ultimately to blame

6) he proposes that the reason for this is in fact because architecture has merely become the visible garnish/figurehead/tip of the iceberg for the (massive) process of (brutal) urban renewal
beneath or behind it driven by institutions such as the state or the market.

7) underlining the power of the market he shows a picture of a city skyline filled with large buildings by internationally renowned architects, highlighting that their existence/creation is/was
dependent not on the people who inhabit them but the market that requires investment objects

Dan Hill – boundary operator

8) Dan starts by reflecting Wouter’s iceberg by showing Papenek’s triangular diagram with the designer’s share taking only a small proportion of the real problem beneath

9) he questions the ability of yesterday’s institutions to produce the necessary outcome for tomorrow

10) showing examples of projects from his time at Sitra and HDL he explores various examples of the networked city

11) suggesting that activity undertaken by a city’s inhabitants are less important for the actions themselves rather than the ability to make networked decisions about what to do

12) in turn suggesting that the culture of public decision making is the design challenge

13) and that in this networked city the government now has competition

14) thus returning to the question of whether 19th century institutions are capable of facing 21st century problems

15) Dan suggests that the experience he’s had in three different organisations of different roles and scales could be described as inside, outside and (during his time at Sitra) at the boundary of key institutions

16) in summary the goal should be to design the conditions that allow institutions to address meaningful public issues

Each had touched on a question of position relative to the institution or institutions that determine one’s role. Jeremy began by questioning whether it’s better to disrupt from within or beyond, Wouter described the dangers of unwittingly becoming a figurehead for the institution behind you and Dan demonstrated what might be possible at the boundary between the two. I think these positions were further contextualised by comments during the discussion at the end of the evening when Wouter (expanding on his comments about market driven investment objects) questioned the possible conflict of loyalties between the direct source of funding from a client vs. the city in which the work is carried out. How do you maintain the balance between civic responsibility and client loyalty? Following that a question from a planner in the audience about the panel’s view on how the UK’s NPPF and debate on localism might impact the institution brought an acknowledgement of the value of the neighbourhood forum. In there somewhere there were also comments about the market of supply and demand that suggested that the profession concerns itself too much with the supply side, when in fact it should work harder to raise and support the demand.

Neighbourhoods – the demand market – are the boundaries to institutions in which an architect’s loyalties must be invested.

It’s fitting then that the following 24 hours of media coverage in the UK built environment has provided much coverage of a growing interest in the power of self build and co-housing ideas and it’s certainly helping me form ideas about which direction I’d like to head in future with my practice.

Finally, I’d like to end by recording a wonderfully succinct and compelling description of the perils of what Wouter described as the neo-liberal myth of the benefits of rolling back the state. Rather than the space left over being filled by the common man, it’s simply claimed by the private market instead.

Horse meat lasagne anyone?

* Note: I appear to have heard Jeremy’s comment on the projection of spatial imagination entirely differently to the fellow on my left, Charles Holland off of FAT who wrote it down properly:

Perhaps worth developing and offering details under a Creative Commons license…

I’m looking forward to seeing some of Hadid’s work further iterated in the future by the algorithms delivering Google Earth’s Universal Texture. It’ll feel like an event horizon in which Parametricism Will Eat Itself. Better yet, if the pirate copy in China gets completed, photographed and rendered by the machines of loving grace first then the copy of the copy might well be such a sublime example of Shumacher’s autopoiesis that we’ll be able to declare Architecture a done deal and move on.

Mind you, there’ll always be guys like Piers Gough to prevent us getting too lost in the new aesthetic by deploying a critique firmly rooted in the old aesthetic:

“The practice seems fond of these etiolated forms that add to distance rather than subtract from it.”

That’s good, isn’t it? Add to distance rather than subtract from it. I’ve been thinking about it all week and whilst doing so I stumbled across this in Ruskin’s Modern Painter’s on the subject of depth of field:

“Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving anything like completeness to the forms of the near objects. This is not done by slurred or soft lines, observe, (always the sign of vice in art,) but by a decisive imperfection, a firm, but partial assertion of form, which the eye feels indeed to be close home to it, and yet cannot rest upon, or cling to, nor entirely understand, and from which it is driven away of necessity, to those parts of distance on which it is intended to repose.”

Decisive imperfection and a partial assertion of form is what Piers was looking for I think.

It’s fitting that the copy of Modern Painter’s I found that in was bought from a second hand bookshop in Derbyshire last year during an event called Laptop & Looms in which I had the pleasure of meeting the folks from Makie Lab and spending the afternoon building a Makerbot. You’ve probably heard of them, they’re one of the few firms actually doing something interesting with 3D printing and rapid overnight production. Except perhaps for the guys rapid prototyping the copy of Hadid’s building in China.

Look what happens when you take the Makie Lab about page and switch the word toys for buildings:

“… a system of creating objects using game technologies – 3D Studio Max, Unity, 3D objects – and transmogrifying them into 3D-printable buildings complete with internal working joints. Which means we can model buildings then manufacture buildings, overnight.”

Perhaps Schumacher should have gone for transmogrifycism instead.

Others have also been noticing this aesthetic appearing with increasing regularity and attempting to interpret it. James Bridle, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Laptop and Looms event earlier this year, covers it extensively in his recent talk at Web Directions South. Beginning with a subtle critique of the imaginary society my profession portrays with our ‘render ghosts’ (a topic I gave the lightest of touches to a while ago in a comment about the spineless deference inherent in the world of Sketchup figures), he moves on to examine the representation of data in building surfaces (my emphasis):

Minecraft has a lot to answer for here. Minecraft is awesome. What’s so strange about it is the creator knew, as a small project, that he could go a long way with gameplay and interaction without worrying so much about the graphics. But people have taken to the graphics to this extraordinary degree. And again, making these things come through in the world, giving the real world the grain of the virtual.

…

This building I am completely dangerously obsessed with. It’s a building in East London, and I literally stumbled upon it while out walking and saw it, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since, and frankly it’s to blame for all of this. It’s a data centre, which is incredibly significant, because if you know anything about the architecture of data centres, they’re usually very anonymous structures. They’re usually big sheds. We have this notion of the cloud, like the cloud is some magic faraway land where computing is done, and it’s not big sheds on ring roads filled with servers. The cloud is a lie. The cloud looks like sheds. And that’s a terrible thing, because the network is awesome. And yet we’ve never figured out a way to – we sort of try to hide it away and tidy it away.

Meanwhile, over on Archdaily:

MVRDV spokesman Jan Kinkker stated, “We’ve had quite a lot of calls from angry Americans saying it’s a disgrace. 9/11 was not the inspiration behind the design, the inspiration was a real cloud.”

The cloud, it would seem, is a territory fraught with dangers for the architect; be they clouds that look like sheds or, in the case of MVRDV, sheds that look like clouds.

Shocking, insensitive cock-up aside, I think I welcome MVRDV’s return to a lower resolution aesthetic. I’ve seen the opposite and it looks like this:

That’s a small part of Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi. It’s a high resolution idea expressed in a CAD curve of many segments modeled on a state of the art piece of technology, ultimately built with a few low resolution sticks by some guys in a desert who haven’t seen their family for months, all so that Ferrari could host stadium size concerts in their front porch. Mind you, it at least gave me something to think about when 15 minutes later Kings of Leon came on stage and sent us all to sleep – despite the fact that the sex was supposedly on fire.

Who’s for a low resolution resolution in the New Year?

(The Isolator found via Anne Galloway’s always brilliant tumblr)

We’ve been using 37signals products at the office for years now. I’m a big fan of their products and their philosophy. For some reason though I remained dismissive regarding the business self-help book Rework they published last year. Probably the fault of that usual suspect: ego.

A reminder on twitter from Nick Grant encouraged me to be a little more humble and give it a try. I’m glad I did;  it’s cheap, easy to digest in one or two sittings and contains a good mix of reminders about well understood truisms as well as a plenty of new ideas. Given that we’re entering an era when so much of the standard architectural service needs to be rethought, now is as good a time as any to consider how to rework work.

Some notes provided in the spirit of the ‘blog all dog-eared pages’ movement:

page 43
Draw a line in the sand: As you get going, keep in mind what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or a service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone.

page 62
Less mass: Embrace the idea of having less mass… Mass is increased by:

• Long term contracts
• Excess staff
• Permanent decisions
• Meetings
• Thick process
• Inventory (physical or mental)
• Hardware, software and technology lock-ins
• Long-term road maps
• Office politics

page 88
Tone is in your fingers: In business, too many people obsess over tools, software tricks, scaling issues, fancy office space, lavish furniture, and other frivolities instead of what really matters. And what really matters is how to actually get customers and make money… Use whatever you’ve got already or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing what you’ve got as well as you can. Your tone is in your fingers.

page 104
Interruption is the enemy of productivity: If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.

page 170
Build an audience: All companies have customers. Lucky companies have fans. But the most fortunate companies have audiences… So build an audience. Speak, write, blog, tweet, make videos – whatever. Share information that’s valuable and you’ll slowly but surely build a loyal audience.

page 173
Out-teach your competition: Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them. Teaching probably isn’t something your competitors are even thinking about. Most businesses focus on selling or servicing, but teaching never occurs to them.

page 222
Hire great writers: If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer or whatever; their writing skills will pay off… Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking.

#twitterkilledmybloggingmojo

The added bonus being this suitably charming cover by none other than Gordon Cullen. As a student of the mid-nineties, surrounded at the time by all the linguistic gymnastics of post structuralist decision dodging, I’ve noticed that with age my later interests appear to be an act of rebellion and I’m becoming an arch-empiricist.  Yesterday I was into linguistics, but today I’m not Saussure.

This is a fact well recorded in years gone by with entries and even the occasional sketch on Cullen that ranged from simple explorations of sections of Townscape through to more unusual assessments involving a skunk called Pepe Le Pew.

I was unimaginably flattered then to recently receive an e-mail from a reader who likened my own sketches to the work of Cullen and even more excited to discover an opportunity to share some more of his work.

Here’s Eric Osbourne describing the history of the sketch he’s been the proud owner of for years:

I have been trying to remember the firm I shared 16 Carlisle Street, London W1 with from about 1968 to 1970, I think they were called Phillip Chandos, because they were drinking in the Chandos Pub opposite the Nurse Cavell Statue, St. Martins’ Lane when the company was conceived – drinking was important to the company ethos! They use to write, design, edit and sub-contract printing for books and leaflets on various aspects of construction and architecture. The Lead Association springs to mind. Gordon Cullen was in and out all the time and very good friends of the main man (a tall guy with a long horizontal moustache and always sporting a bow tie), who had his office on the first floor. All their names are gone now but I remember Gordon would arrive at 11.00/11.30, the office manager would go down and we would hear peals of laughter. At opening time they would either go to the ‘Bath House’ pub on the corner for a ‘quick one’ which lasted until 3.00 or the Braganza, Soho Square in which case you did not see the three of them again that day. After they moved, I do remember going to their new offices in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden for a very quick drink, with accumulated post and the drawing which I had found amongst the serious piles of rubbish they had left behind. I was told I could keep it and I have treasured it every since – it’s the nearest thing I have to a William Blake/Picasso/Durer – a true masterpiece.

I don’t know whether it was commissioned for anything else or used in any publications so perhaps this is its first outing beyond Eric’s home. Thanks for taking to the time to share it with us Eric. I dream, literally, of being able to muster such line quality so effortlessly.

blogging

My hope of getting back in the blogging saddle has resulted in agreeing to try the occasional entry for bdonline.co.uk and their new housing blog. I’ve kicked off by relying on some fairly classic texts for comfort and expanded on what began as a twitter message musing on the value of sculleries. You can see the results here:

www.bdonline.co.uk/comment/blogs/the-housing-blog/

I’ve no doubt the breadth of the topic will give opportunity in the future to wander into both theory and practice and I look forward to trying to weave both together. I’ll also hopefully be using it to subtly introduce other links to online content that you might not find in other mainstream media. You’ll note for example that I’ve snuck some links in to the first entry to the fantastic librarything.com

This is of course partly because of my involvement with…

be2camp

Thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair, his rubber-keyed Spectrum 48k and several copies of Computer + Video Games magazine I am what the technology industry likes to call an ‘early adopter’. During the last 6 or 7 years I’ve been trying to take the geek enthusiasm (ranging from furtive activities such as mucking about late at night with the beginnings of this blog or organising flash mob assaults on Oxfam shops) into my office during the day and use it to change the Way We Work. It’s proved valuable in many ways; from public facing projects that have benefitted from the openness and agility of communicating on the web and in three dimensions, to experience with behind the scenes project management tools that we can include as part of our normal service through to just the simple ability to be able to run an office without being beholden to an IT Department or causing unnecessary overheads.

What’s perhaps been most surprising about these past few years is how long I kept feeling like an early adopter. We’re a conservative bunch in the construction sector it would seem and encounters with fellow geeks were few and far between. This is particularly odd given how obsessed us architects tend to be about concepts of technique or process, making us prime targets for the Getting Things Done philosophy found in many of the online tools available. Our interest in craft and production combined with, say, a predilection for pretentious graphic design and a pedantically chosen font would also suggest we’d be suckers for offshoots in this digital territory like, let’s say, Moo business cards. Yet for years I could cause an embarrassing amount of fuss at a meeting by pulling one out of my pocket and explaining that it was the simple connection of an image sharing site, short run, print-on-demand services and web 2.0 user generated content principles. Admittedly, we’ve adopted blogging and twitter with gusto in the last 4 or 5 years but then we always did like to Go On A Bit (see aforementioned BD blog entry) and frankly, there’s more possible with Web 2.0 Revision B than that.

This is changing however and meanwhile, like a scene from an episode of Heroes, others like me have been gathering to share the powers invested in them by their binary mutated DNA sequence, forming crack squads of digital communication experts ready to infiltrate the-

OK, enough with the uncharacteristic and fairly unattractive hyperbole. I’m allowing myself such melodrama because it’s with no small amount of pride that I highlight tomorrow night’s event at the Building Centre in London.

After several years of be2camp events around the country, the network’s founders will be announcing the results of the nominations and voting at be2awards.com. Those listed, along with many of the folks who came along to support at past be2camp sessions will have given their time and knowledge free at events like the ones I’ve been involved in organising in Birmingham for the last two years. Whilst the meetings and unconferences may not have reached a mainstream audience in the construction sector yet, we know that much has been learnt, shared and developed by all of us who’ve been able to take part.

So, it’ll be a worthwhile celebration. Please do register on the site and come along and join us during the afternoon. Alternatively, just keep your eye on twitter for the most important category of all: Nearest Public House.