no2self.net

Should you find yourself at Ecobuild tomorrow afternoon, be sure to stop by the Thames Lounge and say hello. I’ll be there from 1pm, starting with a talk on passive solar for the ‘Making Sustainable Affordable’ session followed by another on BIM and social media for the ‘Information Modelling for Greener Buildings’ seminar.

I’m particularly looking forward to the latter of the two as I’m hoping it will give me the chance to bring some be2camp ideas to a more mainstream (?) crowd.

See you tomorrow.

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.

John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest

I found another one… Po-mo blast off!

Inside, Charles Moore reviews Jenck’s ‘The Language of Post-Modern Architecture’:

Whatever it’s called, it is probably more useful to to consider how to do it. Here I think Jencks prescription for a ‘radical eclecticism’ is incomplete. His concept of ‘multivalence’ seems to be entirely to do with architecture as communication – simply a matter of horizontal connections. And although the richness and variety of that communication – as proposed by Jencks – is far greater than that we’ve lately been offered, what seems to be missing is the way we feel about buildings – how light animates them and the breezes flow through them, and how they engage our bodies and give us a sense of where we are and cause our spirits to soar, as perhaps the spaces themselves soar.

Moving from the simple horizontal connections to the spaces that make our spirits soar is, I think, where Russell Davies is heading with his new schtick. Read on.

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s.

Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene:

During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely eschewed advertising, the covers became outlandish and featured Cedric Price, Archigram, Foster Associates, Buckminster Fuller, Royston Landau, Alvin Boyarsky, The Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck and some attractive ones too.

Another fascinating entry from a great blog, I encourage you to add it to your feed reader if you haven’t already. I’ll merely add the simple observation that the predominant use of illustration rather than photography serves the magazine well in its exploration of potential futures, ideas rather than things.

There’s much to learn from the 30 year old pages. Of particular interest to me have been the pleas by foresighted ecologists proposing basic environmental science improvements that are to this day dealt with as fringe concepts – such as the benefits of passive solar in the ‘Housing Provision’ issue of August 1976 by Gerald Foley. The landscape issue from the following month (cover by Ron Herron) contains a piece by Sutherland Lyall, whose name might be known to fellow bloggers thanks to his column in the Architectural Review on architecture web sites.  Which gives me another opportunity to thank him for his kind words back in November 2005:

I realise now that I’ve completely ignored his advice about using blogs for company websites.

The December 77 cover showing a beautiful Erskine drawing has been uploaded more extensively before, also you may like to contrast and compare these with somewhat more sombre approach taken by the AR during the same decade.

You can see all the covers I’ve uploaded over the last few years in a flickr collection.

*UPDATE: for those viewing in RSS, click through to the site for the video as it may not appear in your reader*

The Pecha Kucha presentations from last week’s be2camp are now available in both slide and video. The guy who wanders on screen in the eighth minute with a beer in his hand is me. I then hang around for a further 6 minutes 40 seconds (them’s the rules) and tell a story that involves Jane Jacobs, the internets and orgone accumulators.

(Warning: this video contains further abuse of the Venn diagram)

I’ll be parachuting into the capital on Friday to take part in the first be2camp unconference. I’m really looking forward to being able to properly announce one of my latest projects: YouCanPlan Lozells.

A few weeks ago, Birmingham City Council put out an invitation to tender for an extremely innovative and ambitious proposal that would allow the residents of Lozells to comment on the plans for their community through a dedicated virtual environment. The bespoke software was required to be accessible both on and offline, allow the user to explore their neighbourhood in 3D, adjust the model themselves and make comparisons between design options then submit feedback to inform the next stage of development. It should show varying levels of detail, from the widest to the smallest and it should be ready to go in a matter of weeks.

It was a tall order, but I’ve managed to meet it with the help of the guys at Slider Studio. We’ve been collaborating on the development of their YouCanPlan software to create a model better suited to wider public consultation and aim to have the new version in the hands of the Lozells residents by December. In its original outing YouCanPlan was designed for the self-procurement market and saw its first big test during a competition featured in the AJ. The challenge for our Lozells project has been to improve usability for a more diverse user group and test the way hardware restrictions meet the breadth of parameters you need to accomodate in urban design critique.

Michael Kohn from Slider will be joining me at be2camp to talk about what we’ve achieved so far during the afternoon session of stream 2, so please come along and join in the debate about how (or if!) web 2.0 can play a part in the built environment. There’s also going to be a Pecha Kucha session in the evening and I think it still needs more participants…

“Stunning new look for Birmingham’s New Street station…”

Wait a minute, that looks rather familiar…

Gare de Lyon by Santiago Calatrava

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered.

Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Run, run free…. free run.

Dan Mathieson, Head of Sponsorship at Barclaycard, the title sponsor of the World Freerun Championships said: “Freerunning is an amazing sport and some of the moves executed by the top performers are truly breathtaking. For Barclaycard, the fluidity of movement that is at the very heart of free running has a clear parallel with the freedom that we give our customers through such innovations as contactless payments and travel with the Barclaycard OnePulse card. We’re proud to support the first of what we are sure will become major annual events”

Oh dear.

This month saw the first Freerun World Championships in London and they were sponsored by Barclaycard. There’s little point dwelling on the obvious, soul crushing irony here; it’s just too depressing. Anyway, who am I to begrudge these guys the chance to go legit and pay the rent doing what they love most? Every form of human endeavour becomes a potential franchise in the end, right? Might as well embrace it before your sponsor goes belly up in the coming economic event horizon.

However, there’s no escaping the emptiness of the black boxes and railings in the video above. Surely free running has meaning and sense of purpose defined in part by the reinterpretation of the urban landscape? Or put another way, it looks a lot cooler with a good piece of architecture in the background.

So, come on Barclaycard, how about next year you employ some architects to design the course? Or perhaps rebuild seminal spaces from urban topographies around the world. Take a vote from freerunners everywhere and then construct their favourite places on the other side of the world, allowing the locals to reap the benefits of your global reach without all that tedious mucking about with carbon spewing plane jouneys. See how the London boys take on the spaces of Manhattan, or let the New York team tackle urban Russia. You could even employ Richard O’Brian to present it.

Buy the Birmingham Library and turn it into the world centre for freerunning.

Because let’s face it, enlarged photos of shuttered concrete just doesn’t cut it.

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 – books and building – according to Mr Giedion.

The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb a little upsetting. Nevertheless it’s a useful reference with many projects that deserve further investigation. I’ll be adding notes and links in the coming months to a wiki page: no2self.net/wiki. Feel free to edit it as well.

• 1856-1867 The Public Squares of Paris – Alphonse Alphand
• 1857-1860 Central Park, New York – Frederick Law Olmsted
• 1882 The Linear City – Arturo Soria y Mata
• 1889 The Art of Building Cities – Camillo Sitte
• 1898 Garden Cities of Tomorrow – Ebenezer Howard
• 1901 The Industrial City – Tony Garnier
• 1901 Housing Legislation in Holland
• 1915 Cities in Evolution – Patrick Geddes
• 1920 Welwyn Garden City, England – Raymond Unwin
• 1922 Plan Voisin, Paris – Le Corbusier
• 1927 Weissenhof Housing Project, Stuttgart
• 1927 Roemerstadt, Frankfort – Ernst May
• 1928 Dammerstock Housing Project, Karlsruhe – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Siemenstadt, Berlin – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Radburn, New Jersey – Henry Wright and Clarence Stein
• 1929 The Neighbourhood Unit – Clarence Perry
• 1933 The “Charte D’Athenes” – CIAM 4
• 1934 Broadacre City – Frank Lloyd Wright
• 1935 La Ville Radieuse – Le Corbusier
• 1938 Culture of Cities – Lewis Mumford
• 1944 The Greater London Plan – Patrick Abercrombie
• 1945 Saint-Die, Vosges, France – Le Corbusier
• 1948 Harlow New Town, England – Frederick Gibberd
• 1948 Chimbote, Peru – P.L.Wiener and J.L.Sert
• 1951 Chandigargh, Punjab, India – Le Corbusier
• 1951 The Core of the City – CIAM 8
• 1952 Vallingby, Sweden – Sven Markelius
• 1953 Back Bay Center, Boston, Massachusetts – Walter Gropius and others
• 1956 Alexander Polder, Holland – R.Bakema and Group OPBOUW
• 1956 Southdale Shopping Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota – Victor Gruen
• 1956 Lafayette Park, Detroit, Michigan – Mies van der Rohe
• 1957 Brazilia, Brazil

And then the book was published in 1958. So where do we go from there? Answers on a postcard please, I’m off to compile a list from 1958 onwards.

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.

First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.

So, from the bottom up¹:

I’m going to keep these up for as long as I see other blogs in this industry complaining about what a career in architecture is really like outside the cozy world of academia. Too many posts these days about how rarely you actually get to Design, or how undervalued the client makes you feel, or how rubbish everyone else is.

Cheer up you miserable buggers², your career is what you make it.

Next a repost of summer reading and listening suggestions that Phil Clark at Building magazine asked me to help with. You can see many more on his original post.

Books:

100 Houses 100 Architects: Editor – Gennaro Postiglione

Refreshingly critical coffee table picture book that even has some
floor plans. Worth it for Till/Wigglesworth house alone. Euro-centric
cast list means it misses Charles Moore though.

Bay Area Houses: Editor – Sally Woodbridge

Making up for lack of Charles Moore in previous with this one. Perfect
case studies in beautiful suburban housing. Effortless English Arts
and Crafts sensibilities jump the turn of the last century Atlantic
and learn to loosen up in the Californian sunshine. Expect to see
timber shingles in my next project.

This Is A Man – Truce: Primo Levi

There’s a generation of Italian writers who cannot be surpassed. Well,
two at least – Levi and Calvino. Levi tells the story of his time in
Auschwitz and in doing so defines the furthest corners of every human
soul in history. Nothing can prepare you for the visceral contents.

Music

The Red Album: Weezer

Flawless grunge is an oxymoron. If that’s so this the best damn
oxymoron I ever heard. Another perfect album from the guys who started
with little more than a poorly knitted jumper. Includes an ideal
soundtrack for architects: ‘I Am The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’.
That was a joke. Maybe.

Seldom Seen Kid: Elbow

I’m praying with all my atheist might that Elbow don’t get struck by
the Mercury Music Prize curse. If they win we all have to promise not
to make a fuss and let them carry on crafting such heart stopping
moments of metaphysical revelation. Not to mention the moments of
(less-than-meta) physical revelation that you can scream along with
them perfectly; as long as you’re in the car on your own. With the
windows up.

Piazza, New York Catcher: Belle & Sebastian

A novel in one track. I think I finally ‘get’ Belle & Sebastian. Took
me bloody long enough.

notes:
1. ‘designing a house for myself…’ – watch this space, I’m currently making a bid for a plot of land
2. this month’s Monty Python quote quota has now been met. Next month: The Two Ronnies