Pevsner, the Early Life: Germany and Art
By Stephen Games

In 2002 Stephen Games wrote an article in the Evening Standard about the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, provocatively headlined A Nazi in England. It was extracted from the introduction to Games’s book Pevsner on Art and Architecture: The Radio Talks. In it Games detailed how Pevsner, a man of Jewish extraction, had been sympathetic to Nazi ideals before he was forced to leave Germany in 1935 and how he had arrived in England very reluctantly. The article prompted a sustained attack on its writer and a vigorous defence of Pevsner from those who had known the German scholar and from other critics and journalists. Jonathan Meades was particularly outspoken in his attack on Games who he accused of writing opportunistically to prime the market for his book. Simon Jenkins and Kenneth Powell both attacked Games as well.

Those who mounted the counter-attack with such astonishing fervour overlooked, as this book makes quite clear, that Pevsner was, well, a bit of a Nazi. Once he was forced into exile because of his ancestry he no doubt changed his mind but in December 1933, where this book tellingly ends, he is clearly sympathetic to the goals of the Nazi party of the time.Of course, Games’s case was not helped by that headline. In an appendix to this second book on Pevsner, Games details how he tried to get it changed but failed. The online version still bears that slightly deceptive headline today.

To be clear, his argument is not that the famed art historian was a goose-stepping anti-Semite later when he was establishing the Buildings of England series for which he is justly lauded to this day. But despite being unable to gain access to family archives, Games has found plenty of evidence of Pevsner’s questionable, earlier political sympathies. Since Games’s article, friends of Pevsner had explained away his views at this time by saying the scholar knew nothing about politics.

This didn’t stop him writing about it however. Of particular note is a piece written in defence of that well known art critic, Joseph Goebbels. The future Minister of Propaganda had suggested that art in a liberal democracy poisoned people’s will. Pevsner chimed in with the praise that: ‘Goebbels’ argument connects past centuries seamlessly to what is most alive in the art of the last decades.’ He adds that ‘the way [or path that] Goebbels decides reveals unambiguously that today’s artist must serve the driving forces of his time.’ Games also quotes, as he did in the Evening Standard, comments that his subject made in 1933 to a journalist who at the Birmingham Post: ‘there are things worse than Hitlerism; I think your press in England does not realise that. And there is much idealism in the movement. There are many things in it which I greet with enthusiasm and which I myself have preached in my writing.’

Pretty unequivocal. So why was Games attacked for telling a simple truth? Largely, one assumes, through that uniquely English combination of self-interest and sentimentality. We owe Pevsner a great deal, of course. He applied a scientific rigour to classification in art history and mapped the development of art in Europe with a unique taxonomic zeal. John Betjeman, although a fellow member of the Victorian Society and a far better writer, criticised him as a categorist while failing to see that this was Pevsner’s greatest strength. The Guides, of course, are Pevsner at his best – applying a concerted effort to the rigour and scale of vision of the academic environment he had grown up in to the sleepy backwaters of English art history.

For the same reason, art and architectural historians owe him a debt of gratitude for creating an academic field of study that had not previously existed in this country. Contemporary critics and historians defend him largely because they gave them a certain cultural eminence. They do us a great disservice however by denying certain truths and Games deserves great praise for an exceptional piece of research tactfully and humanely delivered. Systems are not everything. Reading his Outline of European Architecture, which Pevsner wrote while interned in the UK as an enemy alien, the reader is impressed by the scholar’s classification of different artistic schools and how they develop down the ages.

What Games book does best is show the intellectual milieu in which Pevsner was operating. As a young scholar, Pevsner looked to Oswald Spengler, author of Decline of the West, for his theory of history. Spengler’s profoundly pessimistic book, which compared the fall of the Roman Empire to the fate of Germany in the 20th century, had a huge impact on Pevsner and one can see its effect on his opus Outline of European Architecture. It is a nice joke of history that simply because Pevsner wrote Pioneers of Modern Design, he was presumed, until very recently, to be a socialist.

Elsewhere Games has noted that the historian believed that the English Arts and Crafts movement had fallen into decline at the very beginning of the 20th century and that architects and designers in Germany had somehow taken over from them. Far from being a champion of the international style, he saw the rise of modernism as proof of a creative ascendancy of Germany over England, through the particular agency of Walter Gropius. It is an ever greater joke of history that Dr Pevsner became English.

Two years ago, Aaron Betksy was director of the Venice Architecure Biennale. His exhibiiton entitled Beyond Architecture in the Arsenale was over-filled with extravagant structures and over-complicated installations: Nigel Coates presented a saddle, Frank Gehry gave us a truncated version of his tree-trunk-y Serpentine pavilion from the same year. The huge Arsenale, a former rope factory, had been filled with the great inflated egos of the developed worlds architectural figure-heads. A network of Betsky’s grand-standing pals.

In 2010, the work is organised along similar lines. Almost every space in the Arsenale is filled with just one big work, often emerging from a very simple idea. But it is the idea  rather than the ego that lives and breathes this year. The best of these, although frustratingly also impossible to photograph is an installation by Olafur Elison, in which tubes suspended from the ceiling, whip violently around the room,  spraying out water while being intermittently illuminated with strobe lighting.

Though the work of SANAA is largely absent from the Arsenale at the  the curatorial hand of Kazuyo Sejima is obvious throughout. Only the Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne makes an appearance in a 3D film, made by Wim Wenders, shown near the beginning of the long complex of former armouries and shipyards. Yet Sejima’s clarity as an architect is made much more apparent in the greatly improved organisation of the display, using the theme – People Meet in Architecture – only very loosely.

Also successful is The Cloud, by Trannsolar, in which a vapour is pumped into the room from pipes mounted high on the walls, creating a dense fog in the upper half of the room. A curving wrought-iron walkway winds its way up to the ceiling, so people gradually find themselves enveloped by the cloud and oppressed by its humidity. An umpromising idea on paper, it feels like it has been perfectly realised.  Ensamble Studio’s faux-concrete girders, seemingly balanced across each other, fill the entire the second room of the Arsenale. The piece, entitled Balancing Act, initially seems bold and dramatic, but the more one looks, the more cartoon-like and lightweight they obviously appear. The giant ‘supporting’ spring doesn’t help, especially when shown to be relatively flimsy by visitos coming along and playing with it.

The strength of Sejima’s approach is that such grandstanding installations are given the space they need to have an impact, and visitors can quite physically appreciate their affect on the space, without feeling over-whelmed. The work itself may be variable, but it couldn’t have been displayed any better. Even Studio Mumbai’s room, which is much more densely populated with examples of models andmaterials, is given enough space to give the impression of a functioning workshop, and one is able to walk amongst the work and explore it in more detail.

Giving the participants, and visitors, such space to breath, and making each room as immersive an experience as possible is clearly Sejima’s approach to creating opportunities for people to ‘meet in architecture’. It’s not complicated or particularly deep, but judging by the atmosphere in most rooms – where people were congregating and enjoying the installations, rather than studying the captions – it appears to work.

A view of the Romanian pavilion.

As ever, the national pavilions at the Giardini were a spectrum of spectacles: ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. From the outright stupidity of the Polish contribution to the serenely beautiful artefacts exhibited by the Belgians, a quiet  tribute to the resiliance of materials and the traces the practice of quotidian life leaves behind. What makes a good pavilion? Architects by and large are not good compilers or curators, and with the slashed budgets that the economic situation has forced upon us, the pavilions that have sought to convey simple yet thought provoking ideas in a concise way have won out.

The Romanian Pavilion, curated by a group of young architects deals with the statistical representation of space and provides an immersive installation that explains the political but, deftly, leaves the poetic  to the visitor. The playfully surreal seesaws and mobile plants of Serbia offer a respite from the intensity of some of the more academic, or plain dull, pavilions. Yet appearances are deceptive and despite the laughter and tomfoolery, there are darker issues to be deduced from the exhibition.

The Belgians poetic show of everyday architectural moments

The less-is-more approach comes across in the Chinese pavilion too. Two years ago they contributed one of the most intellectually stimulating and dense presentations including an incredible display of urban photography and a separate collection of massive cardboard installations. This year they have contented themselves mainly with an installation of glass birds suspended from the ceiling. It is an appealingly light tough in the dark, far-end of the Arsenale, although it has considerably less depth than their previous contribution.

A less intellectual contribution from the Chinese in 2010

In comparison, the Australians have come to wow. The pavilion is bathed in ultra-violet light and is full of 3D projections which  advertise Australia as a nice place to go on holiday both now and in the future too. It feels out of place and cripplingly self conscious: the cultural cringe made manifest.  Other countries have resorted to presenting what essentially are  books on walls, Germany and Israel have managed to put generally interesting ideas together in a generaly uninteresting way. Quite a skill.

Architects are best at making spaces, creating experiences and inspiring debate. Those that have done that at the Biennale this year have naturally done best. Bearing that in mind, and looking at the UK pavilion in context, there should be a Golden Lion heading to muf and the British Council.

Scroll down to see all the work or click on the links below to go directly to the relevant school:

Architectural Association School of Architecture,
Robert Gordon University: Aberdeen,
Bartlett School of Architecture,
Brighton School of Architecture,
Bucks New University,
Cambridge University,
Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff,
Central Saint Martins,
De Monfort University,
Kingston University,
Leeds Metropolitan University,
London Metropolitan University,
Glasgow School of Art,
Manchester School of Architecture,
Manchester School of Art and Design,
University of Nottingham,
Leeds Metropolitan University,
Nottingham Trent University,
Oxford Brookes University,
Royal College of Art,
University of East London,
University of Westminster,

Architectural Association School of Architecture

Fredrick Hellberg: Diploma Unit 13

Winner of the AA’s Nicolas Pozner Prize for the Best Single Drawing of the Year, Hellberg’s design for a Japanese Embassy is printed on a manga-graphic kimono, which shows the building from all its aspects. The lining of the garment opens up to reveal the Tower of the Folding Stones – the office of the Japanese Ambassador – which like Embassy building, is revealed in plan on the back of the Kimono. Hellberg’s work tackles the unit brief of re-interpreting ornament with great individuality and rigour.  Graham Modlen

David Nightingale: Diploma Unit 13

Still within AA Diploma 13, Nightingale’s project for a Belgian Embassy was selected for achieving the best balance between prospect and proportions. This is a noteworthy achievement for a unit which is never fully upfront about the spatial organization of its projects. The unit agenda is ‘the reformed grammar of ornament’ which stems from Owen Jones’ Grammar of Ornament. Graham Modlen

Carlos H. Matos: Diploma Unit 14

With overtones of Super-studio, Mies, Ledoux, maybe even Roma Interrota, Diploma 14 is creating a impact with its polemic views of the city. Cite Carlos Matos’ insertion into the centre of Delft. In his project, Matos revisits Mies’ concept of universal space. He addresses the flexibility and ephermerality of contemporary industrial shed or generic industrial box. Graham Modlen

Aberdeen, Robert Gordon University

Sean Gaule: MArch

Sean’s proposition is for a cluster of buildings containing industrial processing, public promenade and a restaurant for consumption in Edinburgh. The proposals seek inspiration from familiar industrial forms and spatial architypes  evoking an optimistic atmosphere of renewed coastal harvesting and future trade. Sean’s project encapsulating ideas of productivity and consumption, industry and recreation, ruggedness and luxury, and enclosure and openness. David Howarth

Bartlett School of Architecture

Dan Slavinsky: Dip Arch

Slavinsky says his drawing depicts ‘an arcadia at the end of time’. His beautifully drafted project develops a language of ornament, which strongly references the architectural movement of Art Nouveau. The large scale drawings stole the show at the Bartlett which, as ever, ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Owen Pritchard

Brighton School of Architecture

Charlie Piper

Charlie worked closely with the institutions that serve the homeless in Brighton, and spent time with people who are living on the streets to understand their experience of the city. Charlie’s project inserts a series of urban interventions at different scales around the city that act as discreet support structures to better service homeless people and improve the public perception of homelessness. Angie Pescoe

Hien Nguyen Thu Nguyen

Hien’s project questions the ways in which we inhabit urban space and suggests a new set of criteria for urban regeneration, in which the afterlife of spaces is essential to keeping the city alive. Using landscape to create movement, architecture to create institutions,and public services to control time, Hien developed a scheme to regenerate 982m of Brighton seafront. The architecture is deliberately ambiguous and complex. Angie Pescoe

Bucks New University

Torti Hoare

Hoare’s range of hand-crafted furniture used leather that had been boiled and stretched to make it a stiff, structural material. Each piece demonstrated a willingness to experiment and use the material in new ways to create novel items of furniture. Hoare was awarded New Designer of the Year at the annual New Designers show in North London. Peter Kelly

Cambridge University

Natasha Amladi: BA Architecture

The brief for this project was to make a proposition for an ‘island’, which suggests a new way of working around food production and consumption. Amladi’s proposal for a site on the edge of the market town of Ely in Cambridgeshire was to create a youth retreat for school-age inner-city kids and their teachers. Amladi came up with an intelligent and positive response, which marries a social agenda with architecture. Her architectural language is sensitive to the natural conditions of the site, uses materials and ideas which are sophisticated and seductive, with special care given to the interior spaces offering unique and varied experiences for the children. Kate Goodwin

Benjamin Barfield Marks: BA Architecture

With ideas of bricolage in mind– repair and reuse- Ben proposed an indoor scuba diving centre be located in a former veneer factory in a residential neighbourhood in Bow, east London. It’s a playful and novel idea for the re-use of the building, suggesting an optimism for the future. Kate Goodwin

Welsh School of Architecture: Cardiff

Alice Brownfield: BSc Architecture

Brownfield is an exceptional talent. A Part 1 graduate this year, she has the clear individual voice and relaxed virtuosity that marks her out as an instinctive architect. The most beautiful of her piece were created for a public house and hotel, set among the uber-banks of Zurich. The themes of the project and of much of her work are diversity and empathy: that we are enriched by seeing the world through the eyes of people very different to ourselves. Jonathan Adams

George Metcalfe: MArch

It is ironic that just as academia shows signs of coming to terms with the computer as a drawing tool, digital media themselves have advanced to the point where not just drawings and models but architecture itself may be replaced by digital simulacra. George’s project is, one of many in schools around the land exploring similar territory – but his does it with particular maturity and thoughtfulness: the technology, while in the foreground, is never an end in itself. This is some testament to his skill, because the technology is really breathtaking. City 2.0 emanates from a subtle but immensely complex building, in which each space acts as a three dimensional screen onto which alternate virtual spaces are superimposed. Jonathan Adams

Rachel Witham: MArch

Rachel’s prodigious technical skills and fine aesthetic judgement are evident in every creative move that she makes: a gazetteer of foot-worn man-hole covers, immaculately photographed, printed and bound; collage, pencil drawing and, most compelling of all, sweetly constructed models. The inspection covers are gateways to the under-world of our utilities: Rachel’s thesis project is a narrow slice of structure incised along the centre of Holborn’s Kingsway, exposing the rich complexity of our hidden service infrastructure and the ways in which it organises and mirrors metropolitan life. A vivid description is provided by this detail model: apertures linking engineered vessels, lined with gold, elevating the unseen to the immaculate. Jonathan Adams

Central Saint Martins

Gemma Roper: MA Industrial Design

This particular course retains strong links with industry, so that students work in collaboration with firms including Nokia. The Printerpreter is a playful subversion of mobile technology tat knits a scarf according to the characters sent in a text message. Each character is defined by a certain colour yam, which is knitted by the machine into a hoop on a scarf. The machine transfers a message that is ephemeral and throwaway, but a key feature in everyday life, into a physical form that transcends language. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Rohan Chhabra: MA Industrial Design

Part of a series titled Embodying Ethics, Chhabra’s hunting jacket that turns into a ram’s head wall mount is a superbly realised work of craftmanship and concept-led design. Chhabra sees the purpose of the series as exploring the ability of design to ask ethical, emotional and political questions. In this case, the hunting jacket has been designed with an extraordinarily intricate series of zips that allows it to transform into a ram’s head, creating something that promoted reflection, rather than a trophy. Also in the series is a piece of chair upholstery that unzips into a floor rug that mimics the shadow of a tree. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Liang Bo: MA Industrial Design

Liang Bo’s electric charging station are an investigation into how electricity charged cars may work with today’s available technologies. His two solutions included a bollard that provides contact with a conductor plate beneath the car in special bays for charging and a charging station which replaced the battery in the car using mechanics similar to a car wash. The project is believable and a considered response that provides answers to a problem, rather than simply more questions.Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

Josiah Emsley: BA (Hons) Product Design

Responding to the fact that a work surface in use is never flat, Buro provides levels to create opportunity for subconscious prioritising. It also offers a mobile storage unit with drawers that can be self-assembled in seconds. The fittings are the structure; all components are CNC cut birch plywood, laminated with white Formica; to assemble, the user simply slots the parts together. The drawers are die-cut natural cairn board, with a length of elastic to hold the structure tight. Peter Kelly & Owen Pritchard

De Monfort University

Kevin Scott: BSc Product Design

Scott’s design for a collapsible bicycle was a rare example of a ‘one-liner’ idea having potential and was one of the smartest products displayed at the New Designers exhibition in July. The articulated frame, held together with a central chord that can be loosened by the user, allows the bike to be wrapped around a lamppost or tree. There is still room or development in the project: there is no integrated locking mechanism, and the frame will need more work to make it 100 per cent safe, but the idea demonstrated a refreshing clarity of thought. Peter Kelly

Kingston University

William Law: First Year Architecture

Rainham Marshes became the site of a study of threshold, landscape, material and space, culminating in a building composed of 3 spaces. Williams work is astonishing in the quality of its representation, as presented through drawings, models and photography. A model of his project, for a small educational and art building which takes its place within Peter Beard’s wonderful series of bridges, walkways and pavilions that meander through the marshes, is a strongly spatial and material presence, captured through exquisite model photography. Layers of paint, built up on surfaces of the large scale model, drip and run to exemplify the layers of weathering, time and renewal of the surface within this harsh, exposed environment. Internally the spaces are articulated as a series of intimate connected rooms, each with a particular quality and relationship to the landscape and the horizon. This is exemplary first year work, deeply rooted in the physical and tectonic qualities and bodes well for the future of the profession. David Howarth

Carlos dos Santos: Diploma in Architecture

The Ocean Estate at Shandy Park in Stepney Green used to be one of the most deprived Estates in Britain. Today, the area is changing radically with substantial funding. Carlos dos Santos has engaged with this scenario in an intelligent and inspiring way, setting his project for a new mosque for the area as a tool for invigorating the place itself. Carlos’ project makes an inspiring effort to open up the rich and hidden world of domesticity to the public realm, and to infuse this richness into his architecture.  His calm and straightforward analysis of the existing buildings and local people brings richness to his architecture. David Howarth

Paul Kittle: Diploma in Architecture

Paul Kittle’s work is concerned with the fallout from the construction of the M11 in the Roding Valley in the early 1970s. The comparison brought to light a series of peculiar landscape spaces which have an in-between character – caught between infrastructure and suburbia. The project proposes the transformation of existing Victorian brick sheds and co-opts modern electricity pylons to make three building groups each designed as a pairing of a big shed and a tall tower. Formally confident and materially contextual, these buildings feel like counterparts to the place, alter ego characters providing qualities of destination. Paul’s work is precise and skillful in terms of materiality and atmosphere but what is most compelling and resonantly right is the serious attitude taken towards investing this unloved landscape of uncertain use and purpose with a new social infrastructure of permanence. David Howarth

Will Pirkis: First Year Diploma

The project, for a school within London’s Lea Valley, seeks to define schools and their grounds as mediating spaces between the Lea Valley and communities that surround it. Will Perkis, a first year diploma student, won the Diploma Portfolio Prize. His work imaginatively explored the landscapes of the Lea Valley in relationship to the ideas of the picturesque, transforming and re-framing their latent, industrial and infrastructural qualities as a painterly horizon against which his  project was placed. The project was sophisticated and eloquent throughout, understanding the intrinsic relationship between strategy and detail, exploring refined tectonic and spatial strategies and articulately responding to precedent. David Howarth

Aladeyemi Aladerun: Diploma Graduate

Aladeyemi Aladerun has designed a new community building whilst working explicitly with the city as a background.  By creating handmade drawings of beauty and precision this information serves as an analysis of the value of what is being measured. Aladeyemi made use of the surface in a range of ways to examine the varied qualities of local identity. Indeed, one of the most notable things about the work of this student was ‘normal’ it is easy to almost miss; a glossy brown ashtray stand. Designed to look as if it had been in the pub for years, it was actually made up of a ‘turned’ Victorian spindle comprising the found shapes of a variety of beer glasses, jugs and other drinking and storage vessels. This work is a sensitive approach to the past and the future of places that uses precise practical tools to locate public significance. David Howarth

Leeds Metropolitan University

Sam George: PG Dip Architecture

A small scale independent brewery and visitor’s center designed for a disused chalk mine site in Reading, to maintain the area’s brewing traditions. An analogy between brewing processes and circulations within the body informs the project. Above ground the internal parts of the building take their form from the vascular like web of circular steel pipes, which carry the brewing processes over the heads of visitors and permeate the underground spaces. Exterior elevations show a building that appears to bubble over ground. Rather than shying away from a subject that is often presented as a national blight, this fun, playful project celebrates a local industry of beer making in the spirit of craft and merriment. Drawings show a design that is playful yet elegant. Danielle Hewitt

London Metropolitan University

Elly Ward: BA (Hons) Architecture

The Studios focus was the Thames Valley and more particularly its means of production – of ideas ,myths, objects and energy. Elli Ward won the best portfolio prize for her exceptional reworking of an existing shed into a new amenity building for a local community of Didcot, the ‘distribution capital of the Thames Valley.’ Wards work has exuberance in its representation and offers optimism in how we might sustainably re-occupy found enclosures such as these for spaces of community activity rather than commerce. The project reminds us of the fun palaces of Cedric Price and perhaps the Palace Der Republic, Berlin and is playful, mature intellectually grounded and above all exquisitely drawn and represented. David Howarth

Lucy Pritchard: Graduate Diploma in Architecture

The final designs of the studio focused on the Medieval town on Monpazier in France and how these ensembles or city buildings can contribute to the public realm of the city. Lucy’s project forms a bridge between the urban grain of the medieval town and the open farmland beyond. The project extends the form of the city with a coherent strategy of building ensembles, forming parentheses between a new agricultural field structure. There is a quiet civility in the proposals and a measured understanding of the subtle spatial hierarchies needed to perhaps successfully extend existing rural settlements and allow them to be fully self sustaining. David Howarth

Tji Young Lee: BA (Hons) Architecture

Tji Youngs project is for a series of water side brick structures; the Boatmans House, 2 boathouses and ‘The Red Hall’, a large warehouse for recycled building components. Tji Youngs buildings take reference from earlier drawn studies of artist Per Kirkeby’s brick structures and are beautifully executed and finely crafted. The pieces are infrastructural and mute, acting as simple vessels for in-habitation, but they are also characterful and ‘uncanny’, extending the rich narrative history of the site.The work shows a maturity, confidence in its execution and provides occasional humour in its narrative. David Howarth

Glasgow School of Art

Alex Whitton: Graduate Diploma Architecture

Porto’s historic center exhibits a huge paradox; a disconnect between an excluded, inner city poor and a transient tourist population. The irony is that the tourists are attracted by the very ‘picturesque dilapidation’ that ensures the social exclusion. The cathedral square is the point where the two sides meet; dense, dilapidated, ‘domestic vernacular’ and monumental, civic scale ‘city face’. The aim of this thesis is to form a program that can express this tension; bringing together the ‘inward’, domestic nature of a homeless refuge, with the ‘outward’, civic face of a performance center. In addition to displaying a formal bravura in terms of its bold interventions in a traditional historical context, the project also addresses fundamental social inclusion issues. Caroline Ednie

Anna Kraay: Visual Communications

A short documentary film about Anna’s dad, a model train/toy enthusiast and former trainspotter, looking at the role the hobby has played in his life and the response of others to these types of hobbies. Anna’s presentation at the degree show was reminiscent of the work of Oliver Postage and Tove Jansson’s Moomins – with a tangible aura of innocence rather than experience. Yet there is no cloying nostalgia, instead (and in common with Postage’s characters and narratives particularly) there is also a great deal of humanity, personal insight and social commentary – with a slightly surreal contemporary twist. Beguiling. Caroline Ednie

Embracing the principles of the Slow City  the brief called for the design of a shopping centre that can do more than fulfil practical shopping needs – one that will also afford an opportunity for cultural, social, civic and recreational activity. Hugo Corbett’s design proposal creates a public market place that not only segues seamlessly into the urban fabric of the traditional market town but also creates a new and integrated public realm experience. The proposal displays an understanding of Crieff’s distinctive character and offers a solution that stitches together rather than radically reinvents the existing urban area – resulting in an entirely appropriate response to the unique location as well as the Slow City brief. Caroline Ednie

The brief was to design of a Cook House where slow food will be growing, cooked and eaten. Hudspith’s proposal formally (and cleverly) chimes with the Slow Movement brief in that it’s set into the contours of the site. In this way it eschews the values of speed driven architecture – and its emphasis on visual dominance.  Hudspith’s proposal is site sympathetic and specific in that it echoes the Roman Camp ditches and ramparts that define this area of Perthshire, and in doing so it’s landscape hugging form, low material impact and low energy approach to design maximizes its sustainable credentials. The feeling of ‘emerging’ from the landscape further reflects the building’s function of growing, harvesting and preparing food. Caroline Ednie

Lauren has focused on suffers with Autism – in particular those who are also diagnosed with Sensory Processing disorder (SPD). This condition affects how an individuals processes and response to external stimuli – dramatically reducing their daily independence. The project was called BOA – Body Over Autism. Lauren designed a range of garments and arm cuffs which when worn, the weave constricts, emulating a deep pressure sensation on specific areas of the body – an outcome that is scientifically proven to lessen anxiety attacks associated with SPD. The project directly addresses the needs of someone living with a long-term health condition. The solution is simple yet extremely effective. Lauren’s BOA earned her the joint winner of the RSA Design Directions competition 09/10. Caroline Ednie

Nathan Cunningham: Architecture

The brief was to design a piece of architecture that embraces the ambitions and concept of the slow architecture movement. Nathan’s work beautifully encapsulates the ideas embodied in the Slow Movement that encourages a ‘jumping off the treadmill’ approach and sense of reflection.  The sense of removal and isolation is palpable, not only in terms of location but also in the spare, earthy language of the Cook House. The space evokes a sense of secular spirituality, and beautifully suggests an architecture that is capable of ‘restoring the inner world’ – a concept at the heart of the Slow movement. Caroline Ednie

“To take blood, you of course have to receive substantial training, but you do not need to be a nurse. What could happen if members of the public were trained to take blood and manage donation sessions away from NHS centres?”  This project suggests how such a system could work and imagines what might happen if the members of a local knitting group were to begin running their own tri-monthly blood donation sessions; exploring the rituals and objects that would evolve over time. This project no only encourages and promotes individuals to take a greater sense of responsibility and self-reliance in terms of their own health care, it is also politically prescient in terms of the current situation facing the National Health Service where resources are already stretched and dramatic cuts are on the horizon. Caroline Ednie

Manchester School of Architecture

Steve Connah

Connah’s project “Robinson at Junction 31: Reveries in non-Place” was presented cleanly and properly. Long 2D line drawings and postcard size colour studies. It’s economically set out, simple, no fuss work. The detailing of the project are reminiscent of Nat Chard, whose work often deals with the notion of an indeterminate architecture. All in all the work was strong, and wouldn’t be misplaced amongst the RIBA Silver Metal nominations. That said, the work could have been more exhaustive. Graham Modlen

Manchester School of Art & Design

Stacy Brafield: Embroidery

“I’m told Manchester has the only school of embroidery in the UK. It shows. None had really considered life outside their Sixties tower; where they are incubated and hatched for three years along with other applied arts departments, including architecture. Yet their work nearly crawls out of the windows and across the city. Brafield works with VCR and cassette tape weaving big, stripy, shimmering black panels that wave over walls, turning space into disco-y-syrup. It tells a story with the materials at a small scale, then stretches or enlarges the work across the space and metaphorically out of the window. Graham Modlen

Nicola Searle: Embroidery

Still in the Embroidery School, Nicola Searle has sewn a geopolitical maps of Africa and South America into cloths of her own design, thread composition and weave; identifying each country in a different type of beaded thread, then taken details and woven them back into shirt details – weird, dour in colour, but visionary. Graham Modlen

Sarah Fletcher: Embroidery

Sarah Fletcher has cast pink masks and pinned some 300 plus masks to a large section of wall in a grid. Each of them has a crack, requiring stitch work to hold together. One looks at them from the inside. Painful.  Her work honours the pioneering facial surgery work that was carried out after the horrors of the 1st World War. Explanation that makes her work all the more moving. Graham Modlen

Steven Clark: Embroidery

Clark mixes carbon, locust wings and legs, a type of ginko bush, hexagonal tiles made from cement plus other materials all stitched together with bronze discs. This raw ambition is folded together to hint at a 3D dystopian view of the future. Graham Modlen

University of Nottingham

Chandni Modha: BArch

‘Decadence is back.’ Modha has lamented the loss of ornament and devised a set of decadent body adornments that serve dual functions. This elegant, insightful project subverts jewellery into a series of useful tools, that in turn are used to calibrate a new architectural landscapes set within Bodnant Gardens in North Wales. The beautiful artefact’s and drawings that compromise this compelling project draw together phenomenology aesthetics and technique. Owen Pritchard

Michelle Yeung: DipArch

This project is a response to the need to provide sustainable and desirable homes at high density. The essential design concept envisages the construction of a huge v-shaped frame on which a large number of revolving cylindrical pods are hung. The internal surfaces of these pods incorporate different built-in functions (so the base might be a kitchen while the roof might be a bedroom. This project has a confident, radical, avant-guarde approach, underpinned by a robust belief in the ability of technology and innovation to solve one of the globe’s looming problems. It shakes off conventional notions of how we should live and how we should arrange our space and it invites us to consider an entirely new way of seeing things. Nick Ebbs

Nottingham Trent University

Samantha Gill: Architecture

The idea of this project is to take dead spaces at roof level in London and to open them up. The concept is beautifully and imaginatively articulated with seductive images and drawings that illustrate how rooftops could be used as a “free running” course by runners and jumpers. The project is challenging, dynamic exciting. It has zest, playfulness and excitement – it points to dynamic new futures and is marvellously free of all the constraints that encourage us to be safe and secure…..not that for one moment am I suggesting we jump from roof to roof that is not the point. A powerful, positive, playful invitation to look at very familiar but largely dead spaces in a new way thereby opening up new possibilities. Nick Ebbs.

Oxford Brookes University

Edmund Drury: BA (Hons) Architecture

An inhabitable bridge for performing arts. Seeking to blur the boundary between artist and voyeur anyone using the bridge was to become a part of its exhibition, the performance itself. Taking its cue from a brief of semi-living architecture the bridge became a series of separate organisms each in constant flux between introversion and extroversion imitating the life of plants, slowly gathering energy so as to present themselves to the world. ‘Organism’ has become one of the architectural trends recently. Among those looking at similar approach to organism, this semi-living architecture proposal suggests a new definition of ‘organic architecture. Mami Sayo

Rodolfo Rodriguez: BA (Hons) Architecture

The memory of the place is captured by our first impression, precisely at the moment where one’s senses are stimulated, generating a connection between the individual and the city. Before using the walking device we are unable to recognize the beauty and atmosphere of the city. After using the walking device the senses are awakened and the individual is able to identify with the place. What a fantastic idea to have a cup of tea with the aroma and atmosphere of the city you are walking. The mechanism of the device is designed to its details. This will definitely create our better future and improvement in day to day life. Mami Sayo

Royal College of Art

Oliver Wainwright: DipArc

This project develops a vision for Mayfair, the area with the highest density of diplomatic missions anywhere in the world. Current trends in London’s development, such as the proliferation of Business Improvement Districts, and the rise of terrorism-driven fortress urbanism, are analysed and transformed into a new urbanism. Grosvenor Square becomes the site for an extraordinary flagship project -  monumental and terrifying. Wainwright’s part of the exhibition was fitted out with a Persian rug, wall mounted flags and a timber vitrine containing BD, Cabe Reports and the Economist, all reporting on different aspects of his project. He operates with a sober sharpness, precision and efficiency, which is uncanny for a student. Judith Losing

Hye Yeon Park: MA Design Products

Park designed two distinct, witty products that brought a humanity and humour to the digital clock faces. ‘Mr Clock’ has a display that seems to flip around eccentrically until the viewer stands directly in front – at this point the clock starts to ‘behave’ itself and reveal the right time. ‘Inbetween Time’ is both a technically impressive piece of interaction design, and an appears work of motion graphics, with the numbers on the display morphing into each other as time passes. Park says that this fluid transition represent the ‘flow of time’. Peter Kelly

Je Baak: MA Communications Art & Design

In the RCA’s Communication Art & Deisng course, Baaks work stood out for its technical perfection and vaguely hypnotic beauty. At the show Baak displayed three animations on loop comprising video footage of fairground rides combined with moving montages that give industrial looking structures the appearance of undulating sea creatures. Much of Baak’s work reflects his interest in Buddhism; reinterpreting everyday scenes to give them a sense of poetry. Peter Kelly

Jamie Tunnard: MA Design Products

The Desklamp/Projector is a dual-function desk lamp. The lamp head contains a LED bulb for use as a normal lamp. It also houses a miniature LED projector module, which enabled moving images to be displayed. The Desklamp/Projector can be connected to a DVD player or TV receiver box via ports in the lamps base. What instinctively drew me to this project was its inventive spirit. It evoked images of modern-day man inventor, sparks flying from a shed at the bottom of the garden. In the audio-visual industry, which is over-populated with identikit grey boxes, this project has a soul and personality. Tonnes of potential, both as a contract product but also as a domestic object. Richard Shed.

Seongyong Lee: MA Design Products

Plytube is a wooden tube created using similar principles of making cardboard tubes, for which Seongyong developed additional process to increase its structural integrity. It is a great piece of furniture. In quite a saturated market Lee’s plytube furniture stands out as original and distinctive, but also feasible and marketable. I love the honesty of each exposed joint, very sensitive detailing and finishing, and then, when you handle the product, it has wonderful tactile qualities too. Richard Shed.

Sarah Wiberly: MA Ceramics

Part of the exhibition Out of Practice, which showcased the outcome of a collaboration between the RCA , MA ceramics and glass and dance company Siobhan Davies Studios, between the Lines was inspired by the quality of the lighting and verticality of studios designed by Sarah Wigglesworth Architects. Set in between two glass panes on the first floor of the Siobhan Davies Studios, this delicate sequence of glass tubes creates a visual rhythm which as well as being an interpretation of movement, in its layout and structure, evokes a close connection to the world of sound and music.
Gian Luca Amadei

Megan Charnley: DipArch

Taking it lead from Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, the project transforms Kings Cross and St Pancras Station into a learning landscape, the main Wikiversity Campus. The Wikiversity exploits the infrastructure of the railway network, the urban locations of stations throughout the country, and the time spent travelling or waiting to travel to offer informal learning opportunities. What gripped me most in Megan’s work was the optimism and freshness of her writing – she is able to create an atmosphere through the content and graphics of a train timetable – anyone for Conversational French on the 0800 – 0846 from London Kings Cross to Peterborough? Her manifesto for unconstrained imaginations recalls the modernist Marxism of Berthold Brecht, which is refreshing and delightful, and the last thing I expected walking into at the RCA. Judith Losing

University of East London

Vassilis Pafilis: PhD in Fine Arts

Vassilis Pafilis work tuned my eyes to a very different geographical situation in London’s New East Town, complete with its very own airport across Royal Victoria dock, setting the acoustic tone. His large cracked-oil paintings; studies of beaches, horizons, heaving seas in thunderous ochres, browns and greys, certainly took me somewhere.   It’s not ‘greek to me’ but it might be to him.  His work is very different in tone to some other cracking canvases in this (very) Professional Doctorate in Fine Art display. Graham Modlen

University of Westminster

Elizabeth Blundell: DipArch

A postal sorting office and private residence dedicated to the collection and preservation of letters in Bayswater constructs an architectural letter to London. Written to address emotional loss within the city, through the practice of letter writing users are encouraged to articulate the loss experienced in their lives. The project forms an ode to absence and encourages the expression of grief in a society where one is rigorously coerced  to don a ’stiff upper lip’. This project combines subtle intervention with architectural rigour that culminates in a powerful yet tender proposition for a building. Owen Pritchard

James Gardener: DipArch

High Tide Street is an inhabitable bridge on the Thames, which shifts with the changing tide and connects to Silvertown in London’s Docklands with Woolwich in the North. Addressing the city’s north-south divide, Gardener’s project offers an elegant means to re-territorialise a once vibrant artery. The project transcends the limitations of scale in architecture. The beautifully composed film and drawings show the vacillating structure reconfiguring to create a walkway over habitable pods. Gardener’s vision of a ‘cultural highstreet’ which includes a floating library, concert hall and fish market, balances the magical with the prosaic. Gwen Webber

Welcome to Strelka, the most exciting new design school in Europe. No, its not big but the recently opened postgraduate institution overlooking the Kremlin in Moscow is guaranteed to provide the most stimulating year of education an architecture student could ask for. Established after a drunken discussion between five Russian friends at the Venice Biennale only 10 months ago, Strelka sits on the site of a former chocolate factory on an island in the Moscow River – a site comparable to the Southbank in London or, more accurately, the Île de Cité in Paris. Strelka will provide free education in English to between 20 and 45 students from Russia and abroad. And another thing: Rem Koolhaas is the dean.

Strelka is big news in European terms, of course, but in Moscow it is even bigger. The city’s inhabitants are primed for stories about the activities of Russian oligarchs and will tell you that Strelka is merely their latest play thing; a more cultured alternative to a gold-plated Audi R8. Sitting in the brand new bar of the institute, the erudite president Ilya Oskolkov-Tsentsiper smiles. While two of the five players behind the school are rich, the circumstances that led to the creation of this extraordinary school, he reveals, are more complex, more intriguing.

‘We were sitting on a boat in Venice during the Biennale and were slightly drunk. We decided that rather than lamenting the sad condition of Russian education and the creative industries we should do something about it. I went down to the room I was staying in and drew up a 15-page presentation, brought it back upstairs and we all said, “OK let’s do something”,’ he says.

Within the 10 months it took to open Strelka, the founders approached Rem Koolhaas. The Dutch architect’s colleague at OMA/AMO, Reiner de Graaf recently explained the chain of events: ‘they showed up on our doorstep, looking for an established name in the world of architecture to boost their educational programme. Their proposed programme was also a bit broader than architecture per se and, since we have a tradition of doing projects on the fringe or outside of architecture, they ended up with us.’ It’s  the perfect match. Koolhaas introduces a conceptual approach to architecture, which it is clear that Russians lack.

Strelka, however, is not the only design school that has recently opened in Moscow. Jos Boys, a respected UK academic and researcher, was recently appointed programme leader in Interior and Spatial Design at the British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow. The school was established in conjunction with the University of Hertfordshire by Muscovites eager to improve design education in the country. It teaches a range of UK-validated undergraduate design courses to Russian students in English, including interior design, graphics and illustration, fashion and products. ‘The aim is to offer an alternative to the Russian education system, which, although of a high intellectual quality, still teaches by rote with students being told exactly what to do. So their creativity just doesn’t develop very well,’ says Boys, who sees Strelka as a welcome addition. ‘[It] is one attempt to generate some creative energy and develop more innovative design ideas,’ she says.

The institute comprises of four studios, a lecture hall, a media library, a courtyard amphitheatre and a bar

Given that the wife of Moscow’s mayor is head of the city’s biggest  onstruction company, architecture is a hugely charged subject. The cards have been stacked against good urban planning in the city but at least there are some individuals emerging who are willing to fight for it. Although the men behind Strelka are united by their success in media, the ambitions of the school go well beyond the fleeting surface appeal of architecture: there is a sincere desire to improve life in Russia. ‘Moscow is increasingly becoming a dystopian place,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper, and it’s hard to disagree with him.

While it is an utterly compelling city to visit, Moscow has reached a historical moment. Although urban planning was rigid and hierarchical under the Soviets, it was at least valued. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet state apparatus, and the intervening period of monopolistic, almost gangster capitalism it now desperately needs planned infrastructure improvements and new public spaces. Moscow has wide boulevards dating from the Stalinist period and a superb metro, but it also has nearly three million cars and is in constant gridlock. The city needs more bridges and more parking spaces. It also needs some system of preserving historical buildings.

Oleg Shapiro, an architect, sits on the steering committee of the Strelka insitute

Oskolkov-Tsentsiper’s concern for the Russian cityscape appears to be thoroughgoing and sincere. ‘It will take years before we see whether this will work,’ he says. ‘We will produce a student, the student will make his career moves and finally we will arrive at a position when he or she has an opportunity to influence things,’ he says. Strelka’s president believes that this has hitherto been impossible in the Russian education system, which is based on the Beaux Arts system, and, more importantly, is corrupt; pupils frequently pay professors to pass them.

Successful publisher Ilya Oskolkov- Tsentsiper, president of the school

This is a fascinating prospect for international students interested in solving global problems. Strelka, however, is of huge importance to domestic students. The organisers are keen to target students from outwith the metropolitan centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. By providing free teaching and bursaries for accommodation they are also permitting a whole different social group to apply to the school. ‘Sometimes the best thing is just to imagine what you would like to have done when you were 24 and do just exactly that,’ says the organisation’s president. Strelka, appropriately, is the Russian word for ‘arrow’.

Koolhaas, of course, has an intimate interest in Russia. The story goes that in 1969, when he was a journalist, Koolhaas came to Russia to work on an article about the constructivist city designed by Leonidov. Subsequently he’s visited the former Soviet Union many times. ‘He’s been to places I’ve never been to,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper. ‘Rem’s not an alien. He understands the worries and the problems of this society, probably better than some of my compatriots. That’s what made it easier. I’m not sure whether Rem would have been as interested if we had been Taiwanese or Canadian,’ he adds.

The two-semester year of studies is divided into a warm-up period and a second term, where students will work on one of five themes. These bare some stamp of themes covered by AMO but are definitely focused on Russian challenges. The first subject is called Thinning, in which the demographics and condition of Russia between major population points will be a focus. Another subject is titled Preservation. ‘Russians more or less accept that constructivism has a certain value but Brezhnev’s era is universally rejected as a monstrosity. Students studying this subject will imagine what should be done with the buildings when Russians finally accept this period of architecture as part of their heritage,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper. The third project deals with public space. Russia is normally not the most open and  engaging society. It is interesting what a designer and an architect can contribute to this. It’s a field of endless variations.

The fourth project is about energy and is linked to the previous OMA/AMO work for the European Union on a new energy system for Europe. ‘In Russia you have the opposite end of the subject. What do we do when you stop buying our oil?’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper wryly.

The school sits on Moscow’s equivalent of the Rive Gauche in Paris, a prime piece of real estate that hints at the wealth of the benefactors

Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the fifth theme, which is called State of Design. ‘It’s about taste and the careers of architects and designers. It’s about what’s being sold and what makes you successful as a practising designer or architect. On a very ironic level, we’ll look into the kind of moves should you make to be a success. What manual should you follow. On a slightly more serious level, it’s the history of changing tastes,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper.

‘What’s really important is that there is always a product. A book. A website. A TV show. Whatever. It is very important that the students’ work does not disappear un-noted,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper. A public programme during the summer is considered as vital as the course itself. It will show the results in the forms of architectural models or media production.

‘What we will do is a provocation. Not only will we produce results ourselves but I hope the sheer fact of our existence will force some of the others to change the way they talk and present themselves, the style of conversation, the choice of words,’ says Oskolkov-Tsentsiper. The aims of the college then is a gradual revolution in the way that Russians think about their  cities and their countries. It is a revolution that any young graduate reading this can be involved in.

A detail from Jurgen Mayer H's award winning proposals

Jurgen Mayer Architects were last named the winner of the Audi Urban Futures Award. The award is an innovation was set up by the German car manufacturer to encourage discussions around the relationship between mobility and urban planning. Mayer’s winning proposal posited a future where cars are run entirely on electricity taken from a smart-grid, known as the Electricity Embedded Environment.  The visualizations of the project, consisting of rapid-prototyped models and Minority-Report-style renderings, showed a world of 2030 where the digital, virtual and real worlds have melded together – cars come with integrated augmented reality software and the flow of traffic is automated. The practice receives a prize of 100,000 euros.

Last night’s announcement was the first major event of the Venice Architecture Biennale. The Audi-sponsored awards event, held in the car-less city of Venice focused on the negative impact of cars on the environment and cities. In addition to Jurgen Mayer, the other finalists were Alison Brooks Architects, Bjarke Ingles Group, Cloud9, and Standardarchitecture. New York-based practice Diller Scofidio + Renfro were involved in the first stage of the awards, which were presented at Audi Urban Futures conference in London earlier, but had to pull out due to excessive workload.

Mayer's vision of an integrated virtual reality and electricity grid

Alison Brooks said: “I think really hard work needs to be done to reintegrate ecology and nature into cities,  and to shift the priority from traffic and infrastructure to nature and people.” Rupert Stadler, the CEO of Audi worldwide, explained the involvement of the car manufacturer by saying that it was essential for the growth of the any company in the automobile to ‘understand and appreciate the culture and growth of cities in the future.’ They have certainly invested heavily in the programme. The prize money is five times bigger than the Stirling.

The event, designed to provoke debate about the future was held in the Scuola della Misericordia, designed by sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. It was part-constructed in the second half of the 15^th century, but never completed and has been maintain in the half-finished state for nearly 600 years. The awards were presented in its main hall, which at 21m x 49m is second only in size in Venice to the Doge’s Palace. The building has been empty and unused for the last 30 years.

Even in positive speculations about the future, Venice gets a doing.

]]> http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/venice-the-car-free-city/feed/ 0 http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/venice-the-big-show-begins/ http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/venice-the-big-show-begins/#comments Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:47:18 +0000 Owen Pritchard http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/?p=8378

The Morion community centre celebrates the opening of the Biennale

On the eve of the Biennale, a small corner of Venice, just north of the Arsenale, is bathed in the soft glow of light from the improvised cinema screen. A Russian film is playing and people are sat on a random assortment of chairs or lying on the floor, sweltering in the humidity but enjoying the entertainment. Away from the architectural congregating at the Giardini, Morion social centre  is gearing up for its own Biennale. Ostensibly a fringe event, it is in fact central to the themes of the official Biennale.
The Morion – a community centre – is the kind of place that normally gets ignored from the Biennale. Thanks to the art group Rebiennale, though it has stealthily benefited from the event. In the centre of the main room sits a table from the Brazillian pavilion, there is scaffolding from the French and timber from just about every country you could imagine. The building itself sits in a working class area, tucked away from view and only encountered by locals and the occasional wayward tourist. For all the rhetoric of the pavilions, it feels that the Morion is the first step being taken to engage the biennale with the Venetian population.

Helping realize this ambition is Nicolas Henninger, part of the EXYZT collective who designed the French pavilion 4 years ago and the Dalston Mill project back in London last year. He has been living in the city since early august and has helped put together the schedule of events at the Morion. He is just one of a few practices that have seen the potential in the Morion and have bought into it and other organisations such as GAU:DI and Wonderland will also host events.

A table from a show at the Brazilian pavilion now sits in the centre

The centre will show films, house the British Council Party, host an exhibition and provide a home to a band of fifteen volunteers and collaborators. Henninger believes that the centre and the work of Re-Biennale who appropriate the exhibits from the giardini are the true legacy of the Biennale. ‘Every two years there is a new theme, there are new shows, there are new ideas. But there is no joined up thinking, each event is insular. Here, the exhibits build on each other and engage with the public in a way the Biennale doesn’t,’ says Henninger.

This year’s theme, People meet in Architecture, hopes to set an agenda of engagement and interaction. Today, for the first time, the press will get to see how this has been interpreted – yet the true engagement of this biennale may not begin until mid-November, when Re-Biennale, with whom Henninger has been working, salvage the remenants and add it the Morion. This year also sees the launch of the Biennale Archive, yet just north of the site, a museum with a life of it’s own is emerging and giving back to the city what the Biennale never does. Its at the Morion where people meet in architecture.

The Venice Architecture Biennale runs until 21st November

]]> http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/architecture/venice-the-big-show-begins/feed/ 0 http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/diary/exhibition/exposed-voyeurism-surveillance-and-the-camera/ http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/diary/exhibition/exposed-voyeurism-surveillance-and-the-camera/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:01:06 +0000 Jay Merrick http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/?p=7954

The great mid-20th century photographer Robert Frank said realism wasn’t enough: ‘there has to be vision. The two together make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe this thin line where matter ends and mind begins.’ In other words, photography can be meaningful reportage or art if it is crafted by humanely imaginative engagement with its subject matter. But this kind of artistry is dying.

Tate Modern’s show, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera since 1870, portrays an ascent, or descent, into our current default condition in which velocities of data are gradually stripping away coherent senses of history, emotion, the future – and our visions of them. Facebook, Twitter, and the other Tourette-ish personality cults that have burgeoned since the Noughties may blind us to the deeper issues of identity.

We have become voyeurs, increasingly seduced by the casual and exponentially vacuous relationships between too many half-understood ideas and images. And we may not care to hear the historian Tony Judt’s warning that our identities ‘will grow mean and tight, as the indigent and the uprooted beat upon the ever-rising walls of gated communities from Delhi to Dallas… The state, far from disappearing, may be about to come into its own: the privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded as political trumps.’

Exposed is therefore timely, and carefully measured, in the way it deals with luridly invasive or literally cheap-shot material. In general, most of the imagery from the late 19^th and early 20th century seems fairly decently ’sociological’; the images of working people by Jacob August Riis, for example, are blunt, but we can only pity his subjects, not judge them or feel we have spied on them for our amusement.

How ironic that the part of the show dealing with this flakier response, Celebrity and The Public, is perhaps its least dramatic; perhaps the curators realised that there was no point in competing with the 21st century’s tsunami of pap shots. Marcello Geppetti’s shots of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor not quite getting it on in 1962, and Tazio Secchiaroli’s 1958 images of the sharp-suited husband of Anita Ekberg running after a snatch photographer, seem both torpid and comic. The fractious relationship between the concerned and the prying photographer is well established in the exhibition’s first space in the Unseen Photographer segment. Walker Evans’ shots of subway passengers in the 1930s are clearly covert reportage; but Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s Heads, from 1951, are unsettling and ambiguous in the way they capture the vivid, but utterly vulnerable, unselfconsciousness of their subjects.

The sheer visual breadth of the Exposed show confirms an accelerating and complicit acceptance of detailed, voyeuristic absorption. Bruce Nauman’s Surveillance Pieces, from 1970; the video stills from Thomas Demand’s 2007 work, Camera; and images from Nan Goldin’s 17-year project, Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1986, are obvious but unremarkable examples.

But how are we supposed to react  to the crudely squeezed nipple and breast-milk trajectories in Cammie Toloui’s Milk Squirt? Is even Brassaï’s Chez Suzy, shot with such elegance of framing in 1932, just ruthless sexual surveillance? And there must be something uncomfortably revealing in thinking that Merry Alpern’s images, Dirty Windows, and Shopping, are the most ruthlessly perfect compositions since Cartier- Bresson’s Leica captured a very different genre of human foible. Is there something shameful in thinking Alpern a genius, even as we see how brilliantly she strips away everything except the loss of human grace in an addict’s basement room, or a shop changing room?

Exposed leaves one wondering how surveillance art might reinvent its subject matter meaningfully as critique, primal scream, or sheer creative otherness when, in America, the National Security Agency and Cyber Command are committing billions of dollars to create acres of supercomputers to process surveillance sensor data.

The electricity to run them will cost $70m (about £47m) a year, and they will process Yottabytes of information – the equivalent of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pages of text (call it an even septillion) at any single moment. In Britain, meanwhile, 4.2m surveillance cameras make ours the most thoroughly observed nation in the world. Such is the realm  of the only significant avant-garde force: profitable globalisation, and the ruthless pathology of scrutiny and classification it has spawned in the name of progress and security.

Exposed confirms a process of increasingly degraded relationships between the image viewer and the viewed. Why else would one study Tom Howard’s ghastly 1938 sepia photograph of the electrocution of Ruth Snyder so closely and at such length? What is surveillance culture, and the art in its slipstream, doing to the signs and codes of human bodies, daily lives, and creative motives? Robert Frank’s fine line between matter and mind is being inexorably erased by the medium he revered.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art contains spaces that are completely internalised and without natural light

‘I love this city,’ enthused my taxi driver, ‘it’s like New York: 24 hour.’ And keeping up the banter until Ben Gurion Airport, he presented a good simulcrum of a New York cabbie though the statement itself was a touch hyperbolic, considering the scale and physical make-up of Tel Aviv. Its inner-city population is only 400,000 and until recently the city was relatively low rise. But the parallels are there. Tel Aviv-Yafo – to give the city its full name reflecting its municipal union with the ancient port city of Jaffa – is Israel’s most financially robust, culturally dominant, and liberal city.

Starting with the celebration last year of the Tel Aviv’s centennial, it seems the city is looking afresh at how to market itself internationally: casting around for its ‘Big Apple’ ticket. In some ways, self-promotion is an inherent part of the city’s identity. The name Tel Aviv can be seen as an early form of marketing, designed, like New York, to hold similar historical-but-new resonances. It comes from the Hebrew translation by Nahum Sokolow of Altneuland, the title of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist novel. Tel means an archaeological mound or site literally layered in history; aviv means Spring.

Now, the city has appointed an international outreach coordinator, the highly personable Eytan Schwartz, who runs through the expected routine ‘not competing with the big global cities’; ‘looking at what makes us a unique destination’; ‘learning from Barcelona’ but then also, much more tellingly, states: ‘we want to be normal’, underlining the desire to lose what makes living in Israel utterly unique: its political context as a state existing as part-palimpsest with that of the Palestinians.

The design of the Museum of Art is redolent of Libeskind’s work

Architecture and construction is always political – a potential tool of those in power – and this truer in Israel than anywhere else, as the remains of the Ottoman and British presence here attests. In Gaza, on their withdrawal in 2005, the Israelis demolished their settlements before pulling out. Rather than a process of relinquishing control, this was a planned destruction: a removal from use. Sandi Hilal highlighted the key importance of the ability to plan, and the impact of its denial to the Palestinians, in the May 2010 Tate Modern debate, Decolonizing Architecture. This is also the name of the architectural collective she has founded with Eyal Weizman and Alessandro Petti to consider the questions such as what does it mean to reuse ‘the house of your enemy’ and how ex-Israeli security structures might be recycled by the Palestinians.

But just as New York is not America, Tel Aviv is also notorious for being semidetached – politically, culturally and attitudinally – from the rest of the country. This was encapsulated in the 2006 film The Bubble, which follows a story of doomed gay love between a Palestinian and a Jew set against the backdrop of a liberal Tel Aviv, starting during the intifada and concluding in a suicide bombing. In this context, the city’s current spate of look-atme buildings is particularly interesting in that it reveals Tel Aviv’s ambition to be thought of as an international city, rather than tied to controversies over territory.

The Perez Center for Peace overlooks the sea, and when empty seems like a viewing station, a folly perhaps

This phase started in Holon, a separate city from Tel Aviv and one stereotypically looked down on culturally. It’s a bit ‘bridge and tunnel’ as one Tel Aviv architect put it. Here, Ron Arad’s Design Museum has put the city on the ‘cultural icon’ map with it’s vividly red, orange peel-like, Corten skin.

Tel Aviv’s riposte is currently under construction: the extension to the Museum of Art by US architect Preston Scott Cohen. This proto-Libeskind essay in facetted angled facades has a skin formed of silvery pre-cast concrete panels, hung off a concrete frame. Internally it has a steel frame with a series of huge steel beams allowing for the large spans of the gallery spaces described as a series of ‘abstract boxes’, which, surprisingly, will be internalized, having no option of even partial natural lighting.

Further south on the coast in Jaffa, another distinctively clad building has just been completed. The Peres Center for Peace, named after Shimon Peres is on a prominent site, facing the ocean. The Center runs a series of ‘professional, educational and recreational’ programmes designed to bring together Arabs and Israelis. Its design, a linear striated form facing out to the sea, is based on a sketch by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas produced over dinner with Peres, and subsequently translated on site by a local architect Yoav Messer.

Its flanks are formed by alternating layers of greenish concrete and glass, the former cast on site using local sand, layer by layer, with bespoke glass panes fitted between. This laborious process of construction has meant it has taken 10 years to complete. Inside, the facade creates very beautiful effects of light, especially in a strange tall void space at the rear, while at the front, a conference auditorium on the top floor faces a stage with a fantastic panorama of the sea beyond.

When I visited, perhaps because it was nearly empty, the building seemed vaguely purposeless as a structure, more like a viewing platform for the sea, almost a folly: obviously not the intended message. In domestic architecture too, there seems to be more of a look-at-me attitude that means small architectural ‘icons’ are replacing the relatively modest houses of the socialist state dating from the 1950s in which even the Israeli leaders used to live.

In the wealthy northern suburb of Zahala, the architect Arieh Ginzburg is just completing The Orange House: its most immediately striking feature revealed in its name. It is a series of steel-framed boxes, constructed of girders painted bright orange. One cantilevers out and under it you enter the house by crossing a bridge with pools of water on either side that cool the breezes the house is orientated to catch. Every element in the house is off-the-shelf or standard industrial and the colour, exposed steelwork and use of plywood interior fittings, give the house a 1970s high-tech look that feels rather novel again.

It is not surprise that architecture is seen as central to marketing the new Tel Aviv. For Tel Aviv has at its heart the White City: the late 1920s extension laid out by the British planner Patrick Geddes as a garden city, following the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. In its development, it presented a blank canvas for a flood of emigrant Jewish architectural talent who had trained in the International Style in Europe.

What resulted is the highest concentration of early modernist buildings in the world, with street upon street of so-called Bauhaus buildings (although only two of the original architects actually trained at the German design school). For this, Tel Aviv was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, catching a bit of a zeitgeist moment for the renewed appreciation and reappraisal of modernism worldwide. Consequently the city has been able to project itself as at heart an untouched modernist gem: a gift for the municipal marketing department.

Reflecting the renewed importance and appreciation of the original master plan, which still sets the feel and grain of the city, the centennial year kicked off with a conference on the architectural future of the city. Overall, the year-long celebration has had a galvanising and profile-raising effect on discussions of the planning and built heritage and contemporary architecture in the city. Guides to the White City were produced and, this year, Houses from Within, an Open House-inspired event organised by Aviva Levinson and architect Alon Bin-Nun, was promoted for the first time by the Municipality of Tel Aviv.

A clutch of fabulous apartments owned by graphic designers and architects opened up to the public over the course of the two day event, but Houses from Within also gave a fascinating insight into the history of the city, showing how it can be read through its architecture. It included talks and tours on some of the major planning and infrastructure decisions that have shaped it and are shaping it now: such as the reworking of the central space to provide an expanded public space: one of many landscaping projects that are greening the city.

In the centre, the White City is beginning to see major conservation work carried out. One of the leading figures in this is Professor Nitza Szmuk, an expert on the modernist back-catalogue of Tel Aviv. She is currently advising on the restoration of one of the most significant modernist buildings, Polishuk House, built in 1934 as offices over commercial space on a prominent corner site adjacent to the central Ha-Carmel market.

The Polishuk House built in the International Style is being turned into a boutique hotel with pool

The developer plans to convert it into a boutique hotel – one of a rash of such projects that seem to have sprung up in the city in the last couple of years. While this seems a good re-use of an otherwise neglected building, surprisingly, despite its historic status it is going have a rooftop pool, which will mean completely gutting of the building. Conservation laws appear only skin deep.

Many poorer neighbourhoods though, such as the Shapira district in the south an area with a high illegal immigrant population on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa, remain under the radar of the official image of the city. This was highlighted in a recent study by the architect Sharon Rotbard and in his 2005 book White City, Black City. It was significant that the three ‘route’ maps produced by the municipal authorities for the centennial, to celebrate the city’s history, focused first on the White City (the ‘white route’) and then merely used the two natural features of Tel Aviv’s site, the Nahal HaYarkon River to the north and its coastline as a‘green route’ and a ‘blue route’, leaving much of the city as unexplored hinterland.

The blue route though does highlight the much-upgraded beach front, coastline promenade and cycle routes that connect central Tel Aviv down to Jaffa. The historic port there is undergoing major renovation, although there are less welcome signs of new money coming in, such as Andromeda Hill, a gated neighbourhood perched on the slopes behind the port, a development that has already elicited local protest.

The White City was built to a garden city master plan

Overall, Tel Aviv does seem to have an energy that doesn’t need to be glossed-up by marketing-speak. It looks like a good place to live and feels like it’s getting better. There are the usual pressures of traffic, concerns over high-rise over-development and of the wealthy displacing the less well-off in newly fashionable neighbourhoods, but these are the signs of a ‘normal’ city. Whatever the normality or otherwise of Tel Aviv, there seems an optimism in the city, which for the most part is embracing change while maintaining what is undoubtedly its unique feel

At first the numbers don’t seem to make any sense. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976 a total of 742 corporations were allowed to advertise with the Olympic Games. By the Sydney Games in 2000 the number was down to 104. The same downward trend is obvious in the number of sponsors: 628 in 1976, immediately down to 35 in Moscow. The number of licences was 356 in Munich in 1972 and 23 in Athens, 32 years later. Revenues, however, increased exponentially. Using the value of the dollar in 2000 as a constant, the Olympics scholar Holger Preuss estimates that the money coming into the organising committee of the Munich Games from sponsorship was $48m (£32m) and to the Athens committee it was $684m (£461m). From merchandising it went from $5m (£3.7m) to $85m (£57m) within the same period. By making the relationship with the Olympics more exclusive, more money was generated.

This has been achieved through a ramping up of powers by the International Olympic Committee, wresting control from the organising committees of the individual games. If you look at the revenues from the sale of TV rights, which is the primary source of income for organising committees in the host cities, this has slowly been eaten into by the International Olympic Committee under control of the late Juan Antonio Samaranch. Before 1992, the IOC received three per cent. From1992 to 2004 the IOC got five per cent. Since the 2008 games it received 7.5 per cent. In terms of sponsorship, the IOC created its own agency for selling sponsorship in 1996 as well as a host of means of protecting branding. In 1992 the committee launched a campaign to treat ‘ambush’ marketing as an unethical rather than clever method.

During the recent World Cup, we saw how FIFA had learned the same lesson as the IOC: 36 female Holland fans were thrown out of their country’s game against Denmark at Soccer City after FIFA officials accused them of wearing orange mini-dresses to promote an unlicensed beer brand. The mini-skirts were indeed made by Bavaria beer but had no branding on the dresses. (FIFA is clearly now trying to monopolise the colour orange.) The fans were removed from the stadium by 40 stewards. Police then took them back to their hotel and took copies of their passports. We’ll see more of this draconian behaviour happening in London as LOCOG, (The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) strengthens its grip.

We are already beginning to feel the IOC’s squeeze. I recently heard from an independent publisher who wished to publish a plan of a building that was on the site of the London Olympics. It wasn’t for a book about the Olympics itself but related to one of the architects working there. The publisher requested the image from the architect and was passed on to a representative from LOCOG from whom he received the following email: ‘LOCOG have now appointed a Publishing Licensee and we are unable to permit the use of London 2012 content through other publishing companies.’ It transpires that the organising committee is going to publish its own book. Effectively the publisher Wiley has been granted the exclusive rights to the material.

While I can understand that Wiley and LOCOG would be unhappy for there to be competing books on the Olympics, it is utterly ridiculous that no other publisher is allowed to use any material relating to buildings on the site whatsoever. Having covered the 2008 Games in Beijing, I can say categorically that the Organising Committee for the Olympic Games in London is less open and accessible than their Chinese counterparts. Imagine if the Chinese had forbidden the use of images of the Herzog and de Meuron stadium apart from in one single book?

As the IOC has increased its leverage on the local organizing committees; brokering the major TV deals, organising the major sponsorship deals and setting up the systems by which copyright is defended out of all proportion, the organising committees have become mere attack dogs for this unelected supranational organisation we know as the IOC. While we pay through lottery purchases and taxation for the infrastructure of the Games, created by the Olympic Delivery Authority, the IOC, which is increasingly in control of the local organisations, does what it wants.

It is one thing to read an occasional news story that this process was occurring within what I am increasingly reluctant to call the Olympic Movement or read a comment in a magazine. And yet, as often, it takes an event in one’s professional backyard to bring home quite how the undemocratic way in which the Olympics is delivered. Perhaps you don’t feel personally or professionally touched by this, but as the date 2012 gets closer, many more of you will. The event that every man, woman and child in this country is paying more than £100 for.

The IOC’s push for centralisation of revenue around merchandise and sponsorship favours a handful of international brands at the expense of national or local traders.We should return to the days when we had a large number of sponsors and licenses, when, to adopt the parlance of the Olympics, the commercial family was a wide rather than a narrow one.  We also need to have public disclosure of how the Games were prepared rather than it being drip fed to a handful of media outlets.

If it isn’t affordable rents, great public transport and brilliant weather – what does make  London so attractive to tourists and immigrant alike? Coolness, English, cultural variety, pop music – there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful. The real reason, however, that attracts people to London is the quality of retail. That’s at least what my wife says, who comes from Chicago and knows a thing or two about shopping. No need to quote Napoleon here, but she thinks that the Brits excel at keeping shop. Nowhere else can you find such variety, from the ridiculously overprised luxury brand to the sweet innocence of handmade trinkets on the street markets and in side street boutiques. And nowhere else do you see such great packaging, especially for food.

You don’t even have to go into a shop to see branded goods: a visit to the street outside Buckingham Palace around noon will serve the same purpose. This is where the monarchy puts itself on display. Colourful uniforms, shining armour, magnificent horses,  silly helmets and bearskin hats all add up to a total experience. Nowhere else does the United Kingdom look as impressive as on the stretch between Birdcage Walk and Horse Guards Parade. Tourists don’t pay admission to that particular spectacle, but every penny they spend elsewhere while on the island is a contribution to keeping that performance going. The Royal Household may cost the British taxpayer a fortune, but if you count the masses in central London that travel there to see the Royal Sights, it surely brings in more than it costs. No other amusement park in the world has managed to design an experience that is so genuine. No wonder we use the expression ‘Mickey Mouse’ for something that isn’t quite the real thing.

The financial institutions may not be able to generate enough income for the British people if they should be forced to refrain from risky speculation, which threatens the worlds’ economies. The industrial base of the country keeps shrinking; the cheap stuff comes from China, cars from Germany and Japan, luxury goods from France and computers from Taiwan via the USA. Design, however, and especially Graphic Design with branding and packaging thrive like nowhere else. The phrase ‘invisible earnings’ was invented for the money made in the City of London. With the future of banking under threat, the so-called Creative Industries could be the future. Besides design in all its forms, the thriving industries today are fashion, popular music, film and TV. For an island without natural resources, except rainfall, these are perfect. Apart from a little bit of electricity, designers’ most important power source is their brains. Creative brainpower is an almost unlimited resource and totally sustainable. A few beers, cups of tea and the occasional Jaffa Cake will help generate enough ideas to entertain and amuse the rest of the world.

Students of these disciplines could do worse than intern in one of the many brilliant studios or enroll in one of many excellent colleges. I have no idea what the quota is of designer to normal person in London, but I could spend days if not weeks only hanging out in places that are entirely populated by creatives. I even meet ex-colleagues in the street, although I haven’t lived there full-time since 1981 and my last proper project was the redesign of The Economist in 2001. I have no idea how much we designers can contribute to rebuilding our economies and financial systems, but as long as there is any money to spend at all, London will be a prime location for those who still have it.

‘The Solo’, is the latest film by artist Andrew Cross to celebrate the subject without resorting to seemingly literal visual metaphors. In much of Cross’s work the subject is omni-present by it’s absence, it’s deliberate omission literally burns the retina. In Cross’s own words, ‘if people are looking at something over here, then I choose to point the camera over here’.

In ‘Passage’, commissioned in 2007 to celebrate the opening of St Pancras International and High Speed 1, Cross chose to record the changing landscape along the route of a Eurostar train travelling from Paris to London without once resorting to trains and railway paraphernalia. In ‘Passage’ the final ‘arrival’ into St Pancras, via a nearby canal tunnel and accompanied by a David Lang musical score, became a form of spiritual ascension.

‘Passage’, was Cross’s first piece with a musician and ‘The Solo’ seems a natural successor. This time Cross has collaborated with drummer Carl Palmer of rock ‘super group’ Emerson Lake & Palmer, composing multiple camera views to record the minutiae of Palmer’s performance. Yet again we are sent on an enthralling journey as if Palmer is surrounded by an audience of adoring fans and one can only get to the front by way of an impossibly restricted view. There is delight and wonder not just in appreciating Palmer’s mastery of the archetype 1970s drum solo, but also beauty in the detail ensemble of pedals, drums, and symbols. Cross’s framed views abstract the kit and focus on Palmer’s foot drawing the analogy with a foot on the accelerator pedal of a roaring engine hurtling along a track beating to fuel injected cam valves. The allusion of mechanical majesty is further eluded by the title. Is Cross paying homage to great soloists? Is ‘The Solo’ a reference to solo flight and the aviators Charles Lindbergh or Amelia Earhart’s first non-stop transatlantic flights?

So what is it that most appeals in Cross’s work? For this I have to refer to my trusty ‘Aircraft Recognition Guide’ first written by R.A Saville-Sneath in 1941 who divulges the art of observation and reveals exactly what Cross is tapping into.  ’Many people, without conscious study, but possessing a trained or natural aptitude for observation, rapidly become familiar with the appearance of [items] commonly seen in their own neighbourhood. Others find that the recognition – even of types frequently seen – is unexpectedly difficult. This difficulty in recognising different types is very rarely associated with defective vision – in a literal sense. Generally, it arises from lack of knowing ‘where to look’ for certain distinctive points which, to the initiated are obvious and as easily recognisable as the features of a familiar face.’

Knowing ‘where to look’ is never an issue with Cross’s work, as he revels the visual signatures, allowing us to participate in the closed world of the initiated and the obsessive. This instantaneous, appararently instinctive, but certain recognition of, is the finished performance, the final stage of proficiency to which Cross’s piece’s one is directed.

Given most of Cross’s subjects return to his childhood observations associated with growing up on the family farm within the proximity of the British Army and the Salisbury Plain Training Area, it’s clear we are being taken on journey back to halcyon days in which the artist Andrew Cross emerged. ‘The Solo’ is part of those reminiscences of childhood and early adulthood and eloquently reconnects Cross’s primary interests in the music, landscape and socio-geography of 1970s Britain. The English journey has just begun.

The Solo, a film by Andrew Cross featuring Carl Palmer,  1-25 July 2010, Ikon Gallery , 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham, B1 2HS

Toh Shimazaki Architecture Forum
Japan Workshop 201

T-sa forum, an annual architectural workshop initiated and run by London practice Toh Shimazaki Architecture travelled to Tokyo for the first time this spring. Setting up its temporary studio at the British Council in central Tokyo from 29 March to 9 April, the t-sa forum welcomed 16 international students from the UK, Japan, South Africa, Denmark, Mexico and Columbia to explore the overall theme of Context and Craft.

The Tokyo-based forum was a continuation of the research from the summer t-sa forum in 2009, which investigated Adaptable Systems. The site for the most recent brief was an architecture bookshop Nanyodo at Jimbocho (the centre of bookshops and publishing houses in Japan’s capital). With the shop owner Tetsushi Arata and an assistant Masako Nakazawa acting as client, students were asked to develop an architectural principle for the site that would slowly evolve through a design process into adaptable systems. These systems were tested against the building’s use, context, site history and materiality.

In teams of five, the students attended three workshops titled Context, Craft and Casting headed up by London-based architects and designers Ana Araujo, Alain Chiaradia and David Phillips. Collaboration with leading Japanese practices also helped to foster creative and inspirational atmosphere. Architect Souhei Imamura of Atelier Imamu gave a lecture on Tokyo, around the theme of context and adaptability, and the t-sa forum participants visited the offices of Kumiko Inui and Kengo Kuma and Associates.

From here, each group developed the design for their own adaptable systems: circulation, hide and seek, storage, display and permeability. The resulting interventions and artefacts were presented alongside a 1:20 site model, which was built from layers of paper by all students. The completed pieces were then exhibited on site at the Nanyodo Bookshop for two weeks in April.

Participant’s Diary: Robert Grover

Having already taken part in t-sa forum in London last summer, again under the theme of craft and context I left for Tokyo unsure of what more I would learn from the t-sa forum experience.

Although half the length of its UK cousin, the achievements of the Japanese forum were no less impressive. A mix of craft workshops, studio visits, formal lectures and tours of the city helped guide a two-week design project proposing interventions into the Nanyodo Bookshop. The forum was a truly international affair with participants from all corners of the world but perhaps it was the change in location and the immersion in an alien culture that made this such a special experience for me. Studio visits formed an integral part of the t-sa forum and trips to the office of both Kumiko Inui and Kengo Kuma were truly inspirational.

The t-sa forum formalised intuitive working and discovery through making. Coming from a background of a more formal design process this approach was a breath of fresh air. Like re-reading a good book, repeating the t-sa forum deepened my understanding as well as revealing aspects of a way of working and teaching that had passed me by the first time round. Although I probably won’t be making casts out of agar jelly or setting fire to paper boats again anytime soon, the exposure to an unfamiliar philosophy lead me to question my own approach to design.

Tokyo doesn’t seem the place to lose control yet somehow, yet the t-sa forum managed to tap into my primal design instincts, even in the most ordered of cities.

The t-sa forum Tokyo was supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, The British Council and Nanyodo bookshop. The fifth annual t-sa forum in August 2010 is now open for applications. For more information about the workshop visit http://www.t-sa.co.uk/forum.php.

The Surreal House

The image of the home has been traditionally represented within the cultural sphere as the safe haven, a realm of security, stability and comfort. However, The Surreal House capsizes all of these notions. All that is familiar becomes unsettlingly wrung, distorted, melted and torn apart. Sculptures, photographs, paintings and films depict everyday objects subverting the roles and characteristics that they usually possess. Furniture juts out at awkward angles; faces become blurred as domineering furnishings, a fireplace, and even wallpaper, take precedence over human identity. The self becomes lost in the chaotic confusion of malfunctioning, erratic and ill-behaved domestic objects.

The Surreal House opens with windows: an unconventional entrance, and one that immediately shows the gulf between the surrealist idea of the house and the functional, modernist conception. It is almost entirely hidden from the outside, the only hint of its presence being the sign that points into a dark doorway; consequently, as one ventures further within its labyrinthine depths, a growing sense of wonderment at its scale emerges. The Surreal House is far larger than expected, even extending up to a second floor that can pass almost entirely unnoticed until one reaches the end of the first.

The curators have made an intelligent choice over the use of sound, as a multitude of different voices and sounds from various films situated in a range of locations are allowed to collide and overlap each other creating an atmospheric, confusing and haunting effect.

Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy, 1990, hangs from the ceiling, and collapses into an extreme and unfeasible state of disrepair with a musical crash every two minutes before slowly folding itself back up again. At first, it is almost impossible to recognise as a piano; however, the light of realisation brings a smile to the face. The exhibition certainly succeeds in disconcerting and surprising the viewer with its presentation of the familiar in unfamiliar garb.

Within the tall, black walls, unsettling items of ‘furniture’ such as Rachel Whiteread’s Untitled (Black Bath), 1996, or Giacometti’s 1948 chandelier, Lustre, set the mood as dark and disturbing, evoking death and entrapment. Though the light is generally subdued, recalling the fearful descriptions of night from Macbeth, some exhibits, such as Lustre, are brightly illuminated to give them vast, spidery shadows and a distinct aura of menace.

The various displays produce a mixture of different moods. For instance, Jan Švankmajer’s 1971 film, Jabberwocky, is amusing and darkly humorous, in what the exhibition describes as a ‘wicked comedy’. One such aspect from the film includes children’s wooden blocks rapidly manoeuvring themselves into miniature cities, and then becoming immediately demolished, rebuilt and dismantled yet again. Whilst, other displays are purely sinister, Maurizio Cattelan’s Charlie Don’t Surf, 1997, is a mannequin of a child at his school desk where malevolent pencils pierce the palms of the child’s hands. The exhibition both draws you in and repels you away in equal measure in this unnervingly bizarre, yet absorbingly wonderful, world of surrealism.

Barbican Art Gallery
10 June-12 September

Detail of Rock Wang’s hand-carved Brick Plan Tray

There has been much debate in recent years concerning the emergence of an authentic language for contemporary Asian design. At Milan this year, the Yii exhibition of Taiwanese craft design stood out as having a strong sense of identity and relevance to Asian design’s relationship with the rest of the world.

Housed in the Triennale, and curated by Gijs Bakker (co-founder of Dutch design pioneers Droog), the work of Yii has been developed through a group of 15 contemporary professional designers working with 20 traditional craftsmen, under the direction of the Taiwan Craft Research Institute.

The Brick Plan products by Rock Wang use standard red bricks, which are one of the symbols of Taiwanese culture

Among the beautifully made pieces were a carved driftwood and lacquer cabinet designed by Po-Ching Liao, a series of brick vessels by designer Rock Wang, bamboo stools designed by Yu-Jui Chou, and a re-imagining of a low-cost IKEA lamp as a heavenly, gilded temple roof by Jian-an Su.

At the birth of the Tiger economies, when the majority of production was for export, a distinct language wasn’t considered important. Now that so much of the world’s material culture is not only created but also consumed in the region it has become a concern for many designers and companies.

Starting with a solid block of red brick, Wang uses industrial tools to carve out the form of his products

Of course the unpicking of visual styles is made almost impossible by the difficulty of translating each relevant context, history, culture and the transference of influence that has taken place for hundreds of years. Indeed, so much of this is clouded by misinterpretation and ambiguity that it becomes very hard to achieve any clarity, let alone novelty. This is not helped by the fact that what we think of as Western design was so heavily influenced by Japanese craft well before the pioneer modernists picked up the themes of elemental form and truth to materials in Industrial Design.

The pieces are given a perfect, smooth finish and the difference between brick and cement is imperceptible to the touch

Contemporary designers in Asia who have adopted professional models from the West tend to be in touch with markets and manufacturing processes, but are increasingly removed from the traditional skills of their region. An authentic contemporary voice needs to come from both. The scarcity of genuine design explorations that incorporate a sense of craft tradition is what made the Yii exhibition so compelling.

Having visited the Institute recently, I had seen and been impressed by some of the work, but this exhibition really made an impact with the range of processes, the clarity of thinking and the exceptional detailing. It is not clear what Bakker’s Creative Director role involved exactly, but we are told that he was so fascinated by the local culture that he wanted to give it a central position in the project, consciously avoiding participation of any Western designers. This is definitely one of the strengths of the project and has contributed to a coherent, contemporary image, despite the range of disciplines involved. What emerges is undoubtedly ‘Taiwanese’ in spirit. The brick pieces, for instance, relate to the period in the island’s turbulent history when, for a short time in the 17th century, it was a Dutch colony. The settlers brought with them the technology for firing bricks, of which these bright red examples are so familiar on the island. Many of the works make reference to sacred and temple architecture, where so many of the remaining craft skills reside.

Unlike the other pieces in the series, the Brick Plan Tray is carved by hand due to its complex, organic shape

The output of Yii doesn’t indicate that we will be seeing PCs made out of brick or ceramic mobile phones in the near future. I hope not, anyway. But an exhibition like this does help to put these traditional techniques in perspective, and may generate enthusiasm for their potential among a younger audience both in Taiwan and abroad. For those designers involved in the project, it has given them a direct, tangible link to the island’s heritage, which could not be learned through reading, or even looking.

Two vases by Wang. It seems appropriate that red bricks were introduced to Taiwan by the Dutch in the 1600s

Ikea plus Tertial

Ikea plus Tertial
Designer Pili Wu brings ornate Taiwanese detailing to standard domestic. The lampshade has a transparent porcelain cover, with a pattern portraying a mythical battle of tigers and dragons.

Bamboo Barstool

Bamboo Barstool
To create this piece, Yu-Jui Chou split three bamboo trunks at the top, weaving the resultant strips into a seat. It is part of a series that uses bamboo weaving to create precise forms

Cocoon plan sofa

Cocoon plan sofa
Two cocoon-shaped forms made from woven bamboo are combined by Rock Wang to create a sofa. In another version, Wang let silk worms nest on the piece to create a natural, silky surface

Image: Miklos Suranyi, Temporarily Inhabited Spaces, 2010 (c) E. Axelrad.

Anatomy of a Street at Church Street, Paddington

On walking down Church Street, through the Market and past the small independent shops, the colour and vibrancy of the area is at once endearing. Anatomy of a Street created a journey to uncover and dissect the area, its inhabitants and activity through a series of small, pop up interventions.

The journey began at the local library, to collect the map and audio guide; the map, designed by House of Jonn was both easy to use and a design object in its own right, the clear graphics from the map appeared throughout the street exhibition acting as wayfinding for this outdoor gallery.

Image: House of Jonn, Church Street – audio gallery guide, 2010, (c) E. Axelrad.

From the library the route led up and down the street through the never ending maze of antiques in Alfies Antique Market, a modern day cabinet of curiosities. A narrow upstairs corridor, amongst other stalls, featured one of the larger exhibits, a sound installation by Szovetseg 39, a collective of designers who focus on spatial design, architecture and new media.

The installation offered an audio switchboard with sounds collected from various streets in the cities of Pecs and Budapest. This virtual walk between locations, offered a surreal parallel to the journey taken down this London street. Other points of interest included window displays and film projections hidden amongst shops and cafes along the busy street.

Image: House of Jonn Wayfinders, 2010, (c) E. Axelrad.

Anatomy of a Street offered an exciting and engaging series of installations and an adventurous take on the theme ‘welcoming city’, which engaged artists and designers to disseminate ideas around ‘uninhabited spaces’, ‘cultural experimentation’ and ‘urban signscapes’.

Hungarian Cultural Centre and Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre (KEK)

www.artnetworkagency.org.uk

www.anatomyofastreet.org

Image: Innermost Recess, Anda Stefan, 2010, courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Institute

‘City Skills for Life’ at the Romanian Cultural Institute

Lining the walls of the Romanian cultural Institute, hang large photographic displays of gritty urban scenes, mounted on torn and wrinkled paper. The exhibition ‘Innermost Recess’ explores the unchartered territory inside the iconic building that is Ceausescu’s People’s Palace. Architect, Anda Stefan documents and shares this fascinating journey through the undiscovered spaces in the bowels of the palace. The largest structure in Bucharest, both loved and hated by its people, this building is at the centre of the city and of debate. In his complimentary lecture ‘Resisting Interpretations’ Architect, Augustin Loan presented an interesting and unusual history behind the palaces beginnings and journey to its current state, discussing ideas around the way many have attempted to interpret and reinvent this building, which stands as the second biggest in the world.

Romania’s showcase this year offers a variety of architectural insights into Bucharest. To illustrate the beauty and addictive personality that the city possesses, fashion designer Carmen Secareanu has created several outdoor installations, originating from an urban project shown in Bucharest, ‘Welcoming Fields’ which presents several large white flowers and windmills which have popped up around London. The Romanian cultural institute is also screening two films, which accompany the exhibition, titled ‘Casa Poporuli 3+5’ and ‘City Skills for Life’.

Image: Welcoming fields, Carmen Secareanu, 2010, courtesy of the Romanian Cultural Institute

A multi layered showcase to reflect a multi layered city, Bucharest. City Skills for Life aims to demonstrate the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the city and its strange relationship with its inhabitants who grapple with their environment using a set of unwritten but essential rules.

Romanian Cultural Institute

1 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PH

www.icr-london.co.uk

Open from the 21^st June – 3^rd July

Outdoor Installation sites

Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3FD

Southwark cathedral, London Bridge, London, SE1 9DA

Golden Square, Westminster, Soho, London W1F

Images: Stills from another life without Sundays, 2008 (c) Jose Arnaud-bello

‘Architecture and its Inhabitants’ at the Embassy of Mexico

‘Another life without Sundays’ is one of two films screened at the Embassy of Mexico that explores Mexico City using a voyeuristic approach.

Inspired by walks through Mexico City, Architects Jose Arnaud Bello and Sebastian Cordova stumbled across a modern engineered building, working and living in the heart of the industrial centre of the city.

Bello and Cordova use simple fixed images of the inside of the building and its living spaces to illustrate the way this building is used by its inhabitants.  The documentary reveals dark and unusual tales, which play on human curiosity to discover what goes on behind closed doors. On the sixteenth floor “they thought it was an explosion, it wasn’t an explosion, they did it with their hands and teeth.”

Taken on a vertical journey which starts on the 1^st floor and works its way to the top of the building, the viewer is given an unusual insight into the spirit of the building and its inhabitants through human experiences. ‘Another life without Sundays’ forms a fascinating exploration of the building and presents a refreshing and accessible take on showcasing architecture.

Embassy of Mexico, Canning House, 2 Belgrave Square, London, SW1X 8PJ

We would like to invite all Blueprint readers to a public talk by associate editor Tim Abrahams at the newly opened Toto Gallery in Clerkenwell. Inspired by Jeanette Barnes’ incredible landscape drawings of the London Olympic site under construction, Abrahams will discuss the design of the Olympic Stadium in Stratford. He will explore how it fits in with the architectural history of the Olympic Games, the modern architectural heritage of Britain, and the other buildings on the Olympic site.

Wednesday 30 June, 6.15pm – 7pm
Toto Gallery
140-142 St John Street, London, EC1V 4UA

We’ll be going for a drink afterwards in Clerkenwell, so please come and join us.Tickets are free, but please RSVP: info@blueprintmagazine.co.uk

IE = HOME at the Embassy of Japan

In Japanese, the term home is signified by a Chinese character, and is made up of a roof combined with a pig. It reminds us that home is a flexible and historically specific term – in this case it signified a building shared with animals.

The Japanese language does not translate directly into English, and the meanings of its characters are often more specific that words in English. By using architecture however, the participants in this exhibition aimed to convey the term in more subtle ways than language.

Five young Japanese architects all living and working in London, chose a site and designed a home, setting their own brief and creating their own imaginary client. Working in the evenings and at weekends (all have day-jobs working for established firms such as Stanton Williams and Sheppard Robson) they produced a series of beautifully detailed models and drawings to explain their ideas.

Akira Kindo sited his house on the top of Primrose Hill so that it could benefit from maximum exposure to the light. In Japan the edges of a house are often ambiguous and public/private are not such clear concepts: hence Kindo’s house is open to the public as a café during the day, and only at night is it closed.

Nest by Hiroki Kakizoe is a house for a family that lives and works at home. Located on Shoreditch High Street it occupies the site18^th century terraced house. Where a conventional English house would have a solid front wall of brick with openings, Kakizoe’s house has a translucent façade etched with the pattern of the original. Inside privacy can be found in a series of floating nests, which accommodate functions such as sleeping and bathing.

Tokuichiro Oba was another to explore notions of public and private. His ‘Small House inside a Ruin’ provides a home for an artist located in the former Wiltshire Brewery in Bethnal Green. Sliding doors open up the walls so that a large studio space becomes a public gallery.

Masaki Kakizoe aimed to reconnect the city dweller with nature with a home entitled Ephemeral Gardens of Light. Located in south-east London, the house has a deep plan and is organised around a series of square courtyards which allow light to penetrate all the rooms. A roof garden above is covered with vegetation and reflects seasonal changes.

Michiko Sumi’s proposal points to a key difference between life in Japan and Britain. Her house ‘Connecting the Opposite Shore’ takes the form of a bridge across the Grand Union canal in Camden Town and is a home for three generations of a family. In the UK, as Sumi points out, ‘There is an unspoken consensus that is unreasonable for adult sons and daughters to live under the same roof as their parents’. She chose the canal as a metaphor for the physical and mental boundaries between relationships within an inter-generational home. This thoughtful and beautiful project takes discussion about housing into new territory that questions assumptions about how we live and our attitudes to caring for parents and grandparents.

Embassy of Japan, 101 -104 Piccadilly, London W1J 7JT, 7^th June – 30^th July

‘Moss your City’ at The Architecture Foundation

On walking into the exhibition, ‘Moss your City’ presents a sensory experience. Hit by the smell and humidity of damp moss that covers the walls, the installation offers an immersive experience that takes you from the busy London street to a mossy garden escape. This warm, green environment invites you to look touch and move deeper into the space. Whilst there, take a seat and read about ‘guerrilla gardening’ or a ‘moss graffiti recipe’ in the exhibition’s accompanying newspaper. Lit by coloured lights designed by Spiers and Major, the installation has a particularly powerful impact towards the evening casting mossy shadows within the space.

Inspired by the Norwegian landscape and ‘greening’ projects taking place around London such as the ‘Bankside Urban Forest’, this is a really interesting exhibition that stimulates ideas around creating a greener city, and aims to inspire Londoner’s to get involved with urban gardening.

‘Moss your City’ is devised by all female Norwegian architectural practice, PUSHAK. In response to a brief set by the Architecture Foundation, to ‘propose an installation that explores the relationship between contemporary architecture, landscape and natural resources’, PUSHAK was selected to develop their concept and represent Norway in the International Architecture showcase at the LFA 2010.

The Architecture Foundation, Ground Floor East, 136 – 148 Tooley Street, London, SE1 2TU -  19 June – 6^th August

In recent years London has seen a spate of architecture retrospectives for the industry’s largest and most revered names. With the approaching London Festival of Architecture and the forthcoming retrospective of John Pawson at the Design Museum, these exhibitions continue to attract an audience seeking to understand architecture as well as experience it first hand.

The work of the architect is often presented as that of a single artist, however, ignoring the complexities of the architectural process. This summer London’s Ambika P3 gallery at Westminster University will host Land Architecture People, an exhibition that challenges the traditional methods of communicating architecture.

Curated by architects Pierre D’Avoine and Andrew Houlton and anthropologist Clare Melhuish, Land Architecture People treats architecture as an anthropological artefact and discusses how it is informed and manifested through creative vision, human demands and legal constraints. ‘We are assessing the reality of architecture with the implied impression one often receives in an architectural exhibition,’ says D’Avoine. ‘In Copenhagen we found the response to the exhibition to be rather childlike. This is our aim: to give people another kind of experience’.

Working across international and local scales in their respective practices, D’Avoine and Houlton have also taught together at the Architecture Association in London. In 2009, they presented the LAP exhibition in Copenhagen to mark D’Avoine’s appointment as Special Visiting Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Previously, in 2005, D’Avoine and Melhuish collaborated on Housey Housey: A Pattern  Book of Ideal Homes, which was a retrospective of D’Avoine’s work compiled as a series of patterns. Breaking the projects down into components allowed for an alternative discussion about design and technical rationalisation, which underpins the ideas behind Land Architecture People. In removing the material aesthetics and all trace of occupancy, the models are experienced as blank canvases; architecture as a container for life.

It is clear, however, that this approach wouldn’t lend itself so easily to other practices: D’Avoine and Houlton’s work is stylistically conducive to this particular line of enquiry, focusing heavily on legibility. The models of their work have been made on large scales, stripped of detail and primed offwhite. As though demonstrating exercises in massing, volume, form and space this layout allows visitors to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between each piece of work. With supporting drawings, writing, maquettes and architectural pattern books, it offers a way in to understanding the symbiotic relationship between architect and client, as well as discussing the more prosaic nature of land tenure restraints and land-use restrictions.

The models are coloured by candid interviews by Claire Melhuish with the clients, occupants and developers who live in or worked on the projects, offering a right of reply to the architect that is so often missing from exhibitions in a similar vein. These end-user studies are an extension of the process the curators have used to decode the role of the architect and recount first hand the disagreements, clashes of personality and fractures between the parties involved. The transcripts from Melhuish’s interviews explore the cultural role and significance of architecture in contemporary society. ’The object of the research is not specifically to feed back into the design process,’ says Melhuish. ‘The  interviews are not conceived as a design tool, but rather to contextualise the design process, in order to achieve a better understanding of what it means to all parties concerned, and as the latest chapter in the history of architectural production.’

This exploration of meaning and value provides a critical evaluation of D’Avoine and Houlton’s work. Land Architecture People offers a new model for retrospective exhibitions. Its approach challenges the all-too-familiar exhibition format opted for by most architects. A polished display of models and videos curated by an institution that celebrates (deservedly or otherwise) an architectural ‘greatest hits’ package is usually accompanied by a glossy monograph by an author deemed of academic stature in order to enlighten the world to the architect’s polemic. In contrast, Land Architecture People undermines the idea that architect is an auteur who solves spatial and social briefs. Rather, they are depicted as part of an evolving process that has no definite end and shifting boundaries.

Indeed, this is echoed in the level of control transferred to the visitors of the exhibition, who are not prescribed a set of values or a standpoint from which to experience the work. Importantly, Land Architecture People’s approach demonstrates the curators’ belief in the audience to critically engage with the work beyond pure aesthetics.

Land Architecture People opens 25th June at the Ambika P3 Gallery, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS. Until 1st August.
Open Wednesday – Sunday 10.00 – 18.00

Throughout the duration of London Festival of Architecture, members of staff from the British Council will be producing a blog with information and commentary on the projects which they are undertaking.

The British Council organised The Embassies Project for the London Festival of Architecture in 2008 with 24 countries. This time round the number has almost doubled to 39 projects from 35 countries, with a remarkable range of responses to the Festival’s theme, ‘The Welcoming City’. Now renamed as The International Architecture Showcase (IAS), there are projects taking place in embassies, cultural institutes, galleries and public spaces around London.

We decided to commission Bibliotheque to create a collective identity for the programme, including a brochure that takes the form of a passport and 39 unique pictograms to represent each project. As a visitor you will have your passport stamped on arrival at the project locations. Prizes will be awarded to anyone who collects over 30 stamps and those who collect the most will be entered in to a draw to receive six new architecture books donated by Thames & Hudson. Look out for the passports at participating projects and the NLA Hub.

This year will also see the launch of the inaugural Silver Pigeon award for the best project in the IAS, presented at the British Council’s gala reception on 1 July. The award will be judged by a prestigious jury including Tom Dyckhoff (The Times) and Julie Lomax (Arts Council England) and the winner will be announced on the LFA website on 2 July. The award has been designed by David Ward, a second year architecture student at Nottingham University. The project will be extended to different educational institutions in forthcoming years.

Barnes’ most recent work: Aquatic Centre, Stadium and Stratford, 2010

Jeanette Barnes: London Sites in association with Blueprint will run from 14 June – 2 July at the Toto Gallery, 140–142 St John Street, London. Tim Abrahams meets the artist to talk about her work and the human aspect of construction.

Jeanette Barnes has yet to get angry with Las Vegas. In her studio in Hackney Wick in London, Barnes has taped a sheet of paper to the wall and on it has sketched a picture of  the junction between Tropicana Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard. In its subject it is a departure. Barnes has been documenting London’s major construction projects throughout the last 20 years. Sketching quickly with 4B pencil on site, and then  transferring the details with charcoal on to huge landscapes of paper.

Sitting to one side in the studio is a stunning charcoal landscape of the Olympic Stadium under construction. The picture captures the drama of construction: the intensity of materials required, the choreography of machinery and manpower, the energy and effort expended. The Las Vegas picture, though, is something of a let down. While impressive in its detailing, the streetscape lacks dynamism, there is no movement, no sense of a society being built or in deep flux as there is in the best of her work. ‘Don’t look at it. It’s no good yet,’ says the artist. ‘I need to get cross with it.’

The prospect of an angry Jeanette Barnes is a fascinating one. In person she has the good humour and candour of a true Lancastrian, both genuinely puzzled by the fact that she has been working in an unfashionable medium at an economically unviable scale for the last 20 years and resolved to see through her own aesthetic choices to their logical conclusion. It must be quite a sight to see her in full fury. Standing at 1.59m, she draws on paper 1.5m in height and about 2m in length.

Building the Olympic Stadium, 2009

She does a quick and, one hopes for the sake of her husband the well-known artist Paul Brandford who shares her studio, exaggerated impression of herself drawing. Its like a cross between the conductor Seiji Ozawa and Animal from The Muppets. ‘When I draw, the paper is almost my height. I almost feel like I’m exactly in it. It’s the optimum size because if I go any bigger I wouldn’t be able to get the framed pictures up and down the stairs,’ she says.

The anger comes later and it is expressed on the smaller scale. ‘I attack the detail,’ she says. ‘That’s what I get cross with.’ Working with compressed charcoal, she moves lines, adds layers, obliterates details. It is a ruthless process. ‘I do these gorgeous little building details and then they end up as three bloody smudges. I do a great deal of tight information then I stand back and think: what’s the least I can say? That’s when I get cross.’

Pictures like the seminal version of the Olympics stadium are like composite stop-animations. Layers of activity blurred at a later stage. She’s been sketching the stadium for two years and the Aquatic Centre for one, seeking out vantage points around the site and fighting the Olympic Delivery Authority’s reluctance to let anyone document anything that happens inside their kingdom.

Moorgate Site, 2006

It’s no wonder that the world of architecture and construction has shown some interest in her work down the years. In 2000, Rivington Street Studio was acting as design consultants for the Financial Services Authority in Canary Wharf. In this role, Charles Thomson of Rivington commissioned Barnes to do two large pieces of the building under construction. He also bought a couple of her other smaller pieces of Heron Quays and the Jubilee Line under construction. A catalogue that Thomson wrote at the time nailed what  was best about Barnes’ drawing. ‘Her work celebrates the energy and dynamism of construction and captures an atmosphere that is timeless, a reflection of the effort expended by successive generations  as the urban landscape changes,’ he wrote.

Yet although architects have been supportive of her work, it still deserves more. Barnes shrugs. ‘Who wants a building site? Foster is one of the only ones who has bought my work. I’d done a Gherkin and put it into the Summer Show at the Royal Academy. I was at home cleaning the freezer and the phone went. “Hello, this is Norman Foster…”’ Jon Emery, the former head of development at Hammerson’s and the man who reinvented Birmingham’s Bullring, was a fan. He commissioned Barnes to do 12 A1 drawings on site during the construction of the Oracle Shopping Centre in Reading.

Building the Wembley Arch, 2005

And yet, despite an increased interest in drawing in the art world, her work still hasn’t sold. The pencil on the page is seen as a return to authenticity – a response, perhaps to the factory-produced conceptual art of artists like Damien Hirst. A great deal of drawing sold in contemporary galleries is whimsical or introspective, concerned with its own supposed authenticity rather than as a means of refashioning the world. None of it has the drama and scale of the work produced by Jeanette Barnes. It is telling that, apart from the second prize in the Jerwood in 2003 (her husband won first place), the main plaform for her work has been the Royal Academy Summer Show, where, amid other timid offerings, her work stands out.

Docklands Towers, 2001

Yet rolled up in the corner of her studio, Barnes has a hugely important collection of pictures that document the capital’s major projects, which have determined the way the capital has changed shape: Liverpool Street, the Jubilee Line Extension, the Gherkin, the Shard and biggest of all the Olympics. She’s drawn Las Vegas and Ground Zero in New York while sitting in a bar that overlooks the site, but one senses that these are side projects. ‘I went to Las Vegas because it was just so cold in London. I kept complaining to Paul, “I can’t go out and draw,”’ says Barnes. ‘And he said, “why don’t you just go.”’ She got on the last plane to leave Gatwick before it was was iced up and sketched in the relative warmth of the high Nevada planes.

But the London pictures are the main body of her work. For the last 20 years Barnes has taught life drawing for the Royal Academy’s Outreach Progamme, again with her husband. (She whispers it apologetically but she also teaches at The Prince Charles’s Drawing School.) Going into secondary schools for a single day, with a nude model, pencils, charcoal and some paper, they get the students to produce about 16 sketches by the end of the play. ‘After we’ve done the second exercise they really get into it. At first they don’t even look. A 16 year old boy isn’t going to admit they haven’t seen a naked woman,’ she says. Many of her models are actors between work. Children, she says, must be stunned to see someone who has been nude in their school stroll across the background of Emmerdale.

New Bridge – Shoreditch High Street, 2009

It is interesting to consider what has happened to the human form in her work. While her husband’s work, with whom she also teaches, is more obviously about the human form, often in highly dramatic or iconic moments, the body is almost totally absent from her work. Crowds are fleeting and transparent. The human presence is often expressed by the machine it sits within. It is not until you consider that London itself is the body that you see where the life drawing has come into play. Largely uninvited, Barnes has been documenting how the body of London has been growing, with violence in unexpected directions and with its own dramatic logic. It is a very human story. Because while she draws landscapes, Barnes is a great champion of the human aspect of construction.

All images: Delmar Mavignier

The latest work by Chris Levine was unveiled last night at the former Holy Trinity Church in Marylebone. Simply titled Light, the laser installation was a compelling visual spectacle that well complemented the neo-classical space designed by Sir John Soane in 1828.  Levine’s Light was commissioned by the Genesis Foundation. Set up in 2001 by American businessman John Studzinski, the organisation aims to help emerging talents in the field of the performing and visual arts.

Part of this site-specific installation was a myriad of red lasers projected on the church’s walls and ceiling, transforming the space into a mesmerising planetarium in which the incessant wandering of the projected lights resembled planets in motion. The centrepiece, though, was a rectangular box, positioned just below the altar in which a series of moving laser beams ordered in a grid formed the shape of the holy cross.

An integral part of the preview was the exquisite contribution of The Sixteen choir ensemble that performed choral compositions by award-winning British composer Will Todd, commissioned by the Genesis Foundation. Levine’s Light reacted in unison to the choir performance producing a cinematic yet mind stirring visual effect, that brought to mind sci-fi film iconography such as the famous star gate scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as tapping into deeper primal instincts and interrogations of the meaning of human existence.

The multi-sensorial light and sound pieces set in interesting spaces is characteristic of Levine’s work and his distinctive style has prompted collaborations with celebrities, from singer and performer Grace Jones; Bristol-based Massive Attack, and fashion designer Hussein Chalayan.

Light will be at the former Holy Trinity Church, London, NW1, 2-3 June

As Django Hernández was studying industrial design in Havana the 1990s, Cuba was learning to adjust to life without the support of the Soviet Union. During this time, Hernández observed the way that global politics impinged upon the daily, domestic lives of Cubans and how scarce resources led people to create their own furniture and domestic artefacts. Initially as an exercise in design research, he began documenting this in drawings and improvised sculptures that used found objects. This process marked the beginning of his transition into the professional art world: over the past 15 years his drawings, installations and sculpture have garnered increasing international acclaim and this summer his work will be included in the Hayward Gallery’s 2010 summer show, New Décor.

Interior of a Night, a drawing from the Losing You Tonight exhibition at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Seigen, Germany

Hernández traces much of his artistic approach back to that period of recent Cuban history: ‘daily life was taken over by the struggle for survival… At the same time I began to make this big mass of drawings out of what was my personal point of view of the crisis. I did selfportraits, illusionary architecture and cities, projects which will never be realised.’ Just as the people of Cuba were inventing new ways to live, Hernández was making improvisation a key part of his artistic process: ‘it is an important thing in my way of creating: how to make something work without being a professional; how to be free enough to just improvise a new way of sitting or a way of lighting.’ At his first major European exhibition, which was mounted in Cologne in 2003, Hernández presented more than 2,000 of these drawings, which included representations of imaginary and real architecture, designs for objects and graffiti-style slogans or phrases.

Showers in Memoria, also from Losing You Tonight which explored Hernandez’s schooldays

His approach is ideally suited to the new exhibition curated by Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff. New Décor can be seen as a direct development of the Hayward’s 2008 exhibition Psycho Buildings, which saw 10 artists, including Mike Nelson and Rachel Whiteread, transform the Hayward Gallery with installations that ranged from the playful and surreal to the unsettling. Along with a solo show by Mexican artist Ernesto Neto, it will be the Hayward’s first exhibition since closing for refurbishment in February: Rugoff sees it as ‘drawing out the social, historical and personal stories which are embedded in the furnishings that surround us’ and provoking a discussion about interior space in different parts of the world. ‘The exhibition is not about decoration but about the idea of living and lifestyles, and how to start from the inside,’ says Hernández.

There will be a number of overlaps between Psycho Buildings and the new exhibition. The Austrian art group Gelitin, who turned one of the Hayward sculpture courts into a boating lake for Psycho Buildings, is creating a chandelier, reminiscent of a giant spider descending from the sky, while Hernández’s fellow Cuban artists, Los Carpinteros, who created a cinematically exploded showroom for the 2008 exhibiton, will again produce what is likely to be the signature installation of the exhibition: a stretched and contorted bed inspired by a Los Angeles freeway overpass.

An installation view of Hernandez’s La La Lectura y el Sol from Losing You Tonight

Hernández’s work is more subtle, yet of all the work included it perhaps best exemplifies the ambition to explore the political and social connotations of interior design and the objects with which we surround ourselves. The Cuban artist will be contributing two works: one is an installation entitled No Sofa No Tea No Me, a sculptural composition consisting of an incomplete sofa, a worker’s hoodie, a ceramic teacup and a light bulb. This piece was inspired by the tea culture in Cuba, which Hernández says was closely related to the country’s bourgeois class that gradually disappeared after the revolution in 1959. Hernández has an ambiguous attitude to this social transformation: ‘ever since I began working as an artist, I’ve been reflecting on what happens when the role model of bourgeois is removed and how our society can be guided without it. In Cuba it was replaced by a militaristic mentality, but my question is: can society move forward without the bourgeoisies?’

A Year Seated At Home, a piece from 2003 that refers to the year of the Cuban Revolution

The use of found objects is central to Hernández’s work, yet he does not fetishise their worn, distressed quality. Instead he sees them as optimistic symbols of human lives. ‘These objects belong in our interior spaces, our homes; these are the only place where we can be free,’ he says. ‘Houses are the real utopia, the places where we can express ourselves freely.’

Los Espejos (The Mirrors), a collage from Losing You Tonight

Hernández’s second contribution to New Décor takes a more philosophical approach to the meaning of domestic objects. It consists of a solitary chair with one leg removed; the missing leg is mounted on a rotating section of the gallery floor and, as it circles, the leg will regularly, but only momentarily, match up with the incomplete chair. At this moment the gallery space is illuminated to reveal the complete artefact. ‘I want to explore the way an object has a cultural meaning only when it is fragmented, and becomes functional only when it is complete,’ says Hernández. ‘Through lacking something, it forces the spectator to finish the piece.’ The idea seems simple, yet Hernández’s approach endows seemingly rough, uncomplicated objects with layers of meaning.

Drawing (My Birds Don’t Want To Come Back) for the Alexander and Bernin Gallery in New York, made from found audio speakers

Though the artist’s outlook and approach were forged in Cuba, he has been living in Europe – first in Italy, now in Dusseldorf, Germany – since 2003. It is the primacy of the intimate and personal quality of domestic objects that allows his projects to be universal, and more than just a commentary on the political situation of one country, however interesting that may be. ‘Once I’ve bought the objects, I move them to my studio, and then I kind of read them and look for the stories behind them,’ he says, ‘Maybe it’s a table that is missing a screw or it has some weird hole or compartment in it… these unique features give me a starting point to work from.’ He likens it to working like a forensic investigator, but the narratives he creates are imaginary and the clues he picks up are then used as a source for his sculptural improvisations.

Mask and Pages, 2007, using news imagery from the Cuban Missile Crisis

Sometimes, though, the stories are real. The starting point of his exhibition, Losing You Tonight, which was mounted in Siegen, Germany in 2009, was the memory of an event in the artist’s school life: shortly before his graduation, a knife fight between two pupils – which led to one boy’s death from his injuries – took place in the dormitory of their boarding school. Some weeks later, Hernández found a written text between that pupil’s mattress and bed frame; it was about his first encounter with art in a museum. With the work, which combined everyday objects – including functional, technical, and decorative fittings – and drawings Hernández linked this memory to more general recollections of a school system that left little room to develop individuality.

One of Hernandez’s earlier works, The House of the Written Papers, 2003

Drawing is a central part of Hernández’s work, to the extent that he describes all of his work – from small sculptures to large-scale installations – as drawings. ‘It is often used for programming, developing, or sketching out ideas but then the end result has got to be real. But why do we have to follow this process all the way through, if the drawing is as real as the finished object itself?’ He again relates this directly to the circumstances in Cuba where the public rhetoric would be about building a new society and therefore everything was in a constant state of movement, development and change. ‘It’s like living inside a drawing,’ he says, ‘nothing is ever finished yet’.

New Decor, The Hayward Gallery, London,  Saturday 19 June 2010 – Sunday 5 September 2010

Photography  by David Cowlard

The songwriter and Labour activist, Billy Bragg identified his home town of Barking as  the venue for a ‘fight for the soul of the English people’ during the recent election. Sitting right at the heart of this battle ground is a private scheme called Barking Central. Designed by the regular Stirling nominees, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM), Barking Central is a high-profile development in arguably the highest profile constituency. Built by a conventional house builder, Redrow, who has made a rare and,  given the economic climate, unlikely-to-be-repeated foray into apartment blocks, the project was facilitated by the local authority to pay for a refurbished library and learning centre. It was also intended to create a landmark project to signal that the regeneration of Barking had begun. No housing scheme in the UK better expresses the potential for  architecture and, simultaneously, shows its limitations.

View from East Street showing local residents outside the Travel Lodge with its coated aluminium paneling and the collonade of the Phase One block behind

Barking Central was the result of a drawn-out dance between public and private interests; an illustration, for better or worse, of how housing was built during 13 years of New Labour. Unfortunately, housing never really made it to the top of the agenda in the election as it should have, but, in East London, it loomed behind the headline topic of  immigration, particularly in Barking. For here, it was one of the major areas of contention between the incumbent Labour MP Margaret Hodge, also minister for architecture, and, among others Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP). Barking Central, very much the showpiece of regeneration in a town which has been absorbed into Greater London, is more than just one of AHMM’s high-profile projects like Westminster Academy or Kentish Town Health Centre: it is a bell-weather. ‘The scheme was seen as a benchmark for the wider regeneration of the area in terms of the quality of design and provision of public art,’ says Paul Monaghan, partner at AHMM.

Glazed facade of the gallery space adjacent to the library complex, which was originally built in the Seventies and has since been renovated as part of Barking Central’s residential development

The project was long in the gestation, with Barking, which developed around the railways  in the mid-19th century, slowly emerging from various Thames Gateway master plans as a significant point at which to begin development, thanks mainly to its excellent transport links. Although a Peter Barber / Jestico and Whiles social housing scheme closer to the railway station was the first to complete, the area in front of the Town Hall, which  became Barking Central, was identified as key by the local authority who wanted to make development benefit the wider area. Urban Catalyst began as developers but left. AHMM replaced other architects, made the scheme work financially, and Redrow came  in. Unusually, given the fire sale undertaken by many councils during the 1980s, Barking and Dagenham Borough Council still owned much of the land in the town centre. The Council was able to offer the land to Redrow who in turn paid for the upgrading of the 1974 Central Library, into a much-loved Learning Centre, with cafe, gallery and lecture space.

Showing the public space designed by Muf, which incorporates an ‘arboretum’ and a central raised platform for public performance or seating

So, to look at the potentials for architecture first, Barking Central expresses the best of the evolutionary approach to urbanism that has developed in the last decade. AHMM has made a private scheme work urbanistically. It has opened up the vista from the Town Hall to the fantastically named Ripple Road, along which one can reach the shopping centre or railway station quickly. (From the latter a direct train can take you to Fenchurch Street in 15 minutes). Increasing the permeability of the site, the development allows access between commercial functions to the north and east and civic functions to the south and west. It is liked by local people, who see it as a symbol of an area on the rise. According to one, Chetin Osman: ‘it’s a good area with a good council. We are foreigners who came here some years ago and we’ve found it to be a good place, with great connections to London.’ Another local, Olalekan Sarumi sees it as a symbol of a general amelioration. ‘It’s a great place to work and live. [Barking Central] is just the latest way the place is improving.’

The Travel Lodge was originally designed to house office space, but, given Barking Central’s proximity to the Olympic site, became an attractive proposition as a hotel

Architecturally, the five separate blocks have some great moments. A steel table placed over the existing library provides support for two slab blocks. The legs of this table form a colonnade of cranked steel columns. The gallery, paved in stone, and lit by Tom Dixon’s catenary lighting, is a charming space, developed by the architecture and art practice Muf, who also created an ‘arboretum’ in the adjacent square. The plantings are indeed a more nuanced resolution to public space than the traditional stone street furniture, although maintaining the excavated plantings is an extra cost. The library,  which was paid for by the u-shaped blocks on its roof, is a sensitive rethinking of Seventies municipal architecture. The final phase of the project, the Lemonade Building, is excellent too. The yellow balconies chime nicely with the clock face of the Town Hall and contrast well with the deep brown of the brick facing. The plan with the 65sq m  two bedroom apartments from £180,000 on the corners and the 42sq m singles from £143,000 is simple and well-built. At 17 storeys, it’s visible from the A13 and acts as a textured sign-post for Barking. Its height also makes the scheme financially viable.

Barking Central’s colour scheme picks up on the vibrancy of the local shops and markets. The development links the commercial centre on Ripple Road with the civic centre near the Town Hall

To those who prefer their urban architecture to be neutral in tone, the coloured cladding and balconies of Barking Central is an affront. It may sound trite but immigration has made London brighter in tone. The local market and shops are awash with colourful African and Indian fabrics. As in David Adjaye’s Idea Store in Whitechapel, colour is contextual. Of course, it also works as a marketing device. It is churlish not to  acknowledge that architects are now charged with determining how we think about a building rather than just building it. Architecture practices that acknowledge that the fluidity of economic and political conditions provide an opportunity to create canny design solutions deserve praise. AHMM went beyond the call of duty to make the development with its library as a Section 106, stack up. Barking Central is generous to  the urban grid and well-finished. Cliping about its use of colour is like complaining about the kind of icing the cook has used but to ignore how the cake is made.

View looking northeast along the Piano Works building towards the Vicarage Field Shopping Centre, which was built in the 1980s

Throughout the recent election, Hodge was forced on to the back foot by the BNP over immigration. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, until May 6 had 11 BNP councillors. Bragg’s lyrics may be pure hyperbole but in more reflective mode he acknowledges the problem that Barking faces. He says: ‘it’s not racist to recognize that so many people coming to the borough puts huge pressure on housing and health.  Everyone else in London benefits from multiculturalism and cheap labour but places like Barking and Dagenham suffer as a result. ’Whether the New Labour candidate he canvassed for was the solution to this problem is debatable. Indeed, one of the other unspoken stories at this recent election was the inability of that party to speak up for immigration. It was left to Bragg and bodies such as London First, a group that represents many of London’s biggest companies to make the economic case for migration, leaving the political, and the moral argument largely unarticulated.

The end of the market on East Street looking towards the station on the north corner of the site

Anyone who has visited the centre of Barking, which feels like a prosperous market town albeit one populated by a multi-ethnic population, will know that it does not feel like a socially-riven community. It is the housing estates that ring the town centre, though, where one finds the problem: the Gascoigne Estate, The Lintons, Thames View. The  Lintons, designed in the early Sixties by Borough architect Matthew Maybury and built from pre-cast, factory made concrete components, was a great project of its time but it is falling into disrepair. Although New Labour’s Decent Homes scheme to improve existing housing stock has been one of the party’s quiet victories, the lack of new housing is  causing the social tensions we can see in Barking. Jon Cruddas, a Labour MP in a more traditional mould, believes that the rise of the BNP and the lack of affordable housing in Barking and Dagenham are closely linked. ‘It’s a big issue and anyone who denies it is a fool,’ he says.

The UK’s basic housing needs were not sufficiently addressed by the previous government. Hodge has said as much. In a recent interview she admitted to complacency: ‘when I was theMP in Barking we were a safe constituency and people felt they could weigh the votes in without bothering… And that included me. I kick myself that I didn’t hear the alarm bells.’ A politician who is developing an incredible ability to displace blame in order to hold on to her seat, she pointed the finger at her party’s leadership. ‘From 2001, I was saying, “housing is the key issue.” I showed all the decision-makers in  the party my research and they all thought it was very interesting. Did it change what they did? No,’ she said.

View through the gallery looking south-west towards Barking Town Hall, showing the catenary lights by Tom Dixon

Another local inhabitant, Hayley Warwick, looks up at the Lemonade Building: ‘it looks great but they need to start on the Gascoigne Estate next. That’s where the problems are.’ Barking Central is surrounded by a number of large estates, which are supposed to be undergoing redevelopment. The Gascoigne Estate is predominantly a local authority housing estate of approximately 2,400 low-, mediumand high-rise properties. It also includes a primary school, two community centres, shops, a health centre, a doctor’s surgery and a social services family and adult centre. Its total area is some 84.7ha and it desperately needs renovation. Even without the current recession, it was going to be a huge task.

Jeremy Grint, divisional director of Regeneration and Economic Development at London Borough of Barking and Dagenham admits that the downturn has had an impact. ‘The drop in values makes housing development more difficult in the short term in this area,’ he says. ‘The reduction in public expenditure to take forward large-scale housing renewal  projects has also had an impact on places like the Gascoigne Estate. Our approach now is to look at carrying out alterations on a smaller, piecemeal basis… and create one to two hectare plots to renew and redevelop parts of the estate. We will also look to renew parts of the public realm in the vicinity concurrently. These will be mixed tenure schemes.’ Thanks to the collapse in the banking system, the situation in Barking, so easily exploited by the BNP, is about to get worse.

At the time of writing, the election hasn’t yet been decided. One thing is certain, though, neither New Labour’s system of tweaks to the market nor the Conservative’s localism will significantly address our housing problem. Indeed, our financial system seems increasingly to rely on there being a shortage.

The saddest detail in Barking is that a shelved master plan for the Lintons Estate,  undertaken by Karakusevic Carson Architects, was a pilot project for Gordon Brown’s defunct Local Housing Company initiative in which local authority’s would be given funds to build their own housing. Barking Central, for all its strengths, and they are many, highlights systematic problems as much as it solves them. We are moving into an era when a housing problem will become a housing crisis.

Concept sketch for a desk tidy by Ellen Grindle

British office furniture manufacturer Bisley recently presented a design brief to Creative Product Design students at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. Blueprint and British designer Richard Shed were asked to participate as external judges in the crits.

As well as encouraging students to explore new ideas and possibilities for office storage, the brief also specified that the solution should be made from a single sheet of steel and so students were asked to consider both the design and manufacturing process.

The challenging brief was preceded by a visit to the Bisley’s Newport plant in early April in order to inspire the student and also offer them the opportunity to get a detailed look at the high-speed flat-sheet coating line capable of applying a finish to pre-punched steel.

Concept sketches for a portable storage unit by Dean O'Callaghan

After a concept presentation in late April during which each student was asked to present three ideas, the students submitted their final proposal to a judging panel, which included their course tutors Doug Barber and David Ames, as well as Bisley’s design director John Fogarty and marketing services manager Bruce Whitfield, designer Richard Shed and Blueprint.

Concept model for a hanging storage solution by Rob Masterson

Beyond the office environment, some of the ideas presented by the students were also proposing solutions to fit a home-office environment, and for the storing of personal work documents when desk sharing.

In the upcoming weeks the judging panel will select a winner and two highly commendable projects. The winner will be awarded an internship at Bisley’s design office and their project will then be prototyped.

Concept sketches for a hide away storage unit by Richard Pearce

Bisley, which was recently awarded an honourable mention for its mobile storage office unit Bite in the prestigious international Red Dot Design Award 2010, will be unveiling new products in October at the office furniture fair Orgatec in Cologne.

Full coverage on the Bisley and UWE collaboration will be featured in the September issue of Blueprint.