no2self.net

Taking the time to write something considered and share it online is not easy, so getting reminded why it’s worth it is always welcome.  I’ve certainly appreciated all the supportive comments about my first submission to the housing blog over at bdonline.co.uk and much more importantly I’ve learnt lots in return from people sending links and sharing knowledge. The real star of that show though is undoubtedly the delightful book by FRS Yorke and Penelope Whiting: The New Small House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogging like it’s 2004. That’s the answer it seems. In which case I should return to my habit of just lazily scanning cool stuff and putting it on flickr. So, for no better reason than a desire to share some beautiful illustrations, I give you the 1961 Ladybird guide to London:

The authorities of the airport are pleased to see us, and they have arranged everything for our pleasure and interest. We can but refreshments or a full meal. For children who are not above old-fashioned means of transport, they have pony-rides and a miniature railway. There is even a sand-pit for the very young. But the great thrill is the aeroplanes; huge and graceful, immensely powerful and so beautiful to watch.

Never mind the carbon emissions and the extra runway rubbish: huge and graceful, immensely powerful and so beautiful to watch. Oof.

With thanks to Kinver Village book fair. More to come.

Question answered:

cityofsound says:

It was a conversation between Matt Jones and I, wherein he sketched out his idea (using your notebook it would seem) about a kind of perspectival layered data landscape, building up from Dopplr and related web services – in the manner of the classic New Yorker cover on ‘the x view of the world’ …

I think.

I’ve been itching to tell you about this for months, ever since Matt last put me up for the night at Hotel Webb and gave me a sneak preview. The other half of the ever-inspirational Schulze & Webb has published the results of his Bendy Maps research and the finished product is even more beautiful and game-changing than I ever imagined.

“Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.

As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.”

A map projection that simultaneously places you in your current location and future destination, it offers all the potency of well understood mental wayfinding devices and imagery in one single drawing. The potential, as both a drawing technique for urban design proposals as well as real-time guide for travellers, is huge.

Those well understood devices of course include references to ancient, seminal texts such as Lynchian ideas of nodes, boundaries and paths etc., but in the title of the project itself – ‘Here & There’ – lies another connection to the world of mid-20th century urban design theory explored here in past entries: Gordon Cullen’s Townscape.

From our previous entry:

“Place…is concerned with our reactions to the position of our body in the environment. This is as simple as it appears to be. It means, for instance, that when you go into a room you utter to yourself the unspoken words ‘I am outside IT, I am entering IT, I am in the middle of IT’. At this level of conciousness we are dealing with a range of experience stemming from the major impacts of exposure and enclosure.

…

Arising out of this sense of identity or sympathy with the environment … we discover that no sooner do we postulate a HERE than automatically we must create a THERE, for you cannot have one without the other. Some of the greatest townscape effects are created by a skillful relationship between the two…”

Which you may remember was followed by a some other examples supported by the imagery in Chuck Jones’ Pepe Le Pew cartoons.

You can read more about bendy maps on the S&W blog and order your own copy on the official project page or read more about it in this month’s Wired UK. I’ll certainly be ordering a copy for my wall, but as beautiful as it is I still can’t help dreaming about a version rendered like a letratone covered Cullen sketch or Chuck Jones animation cell.

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.

A timely post from the Staufenberger Repository on clip art as I prepare my Powerpoint for next week:

Includes an outrageous comment from me suggesting that my old letraset uploads were without precedent. In fact, the very opposite is true.

Patrick sent over the direct links for each of these fine collections:

store.doverpublications.com/0486273512.html

store.doverpublications.com/0486257622.html

store.doverpublications.com/048628218x.html

store.doverpublications.com/0486243419.html

Some work on a lecture I recently gave about Secured by Design (more on that coming up) produced a spin-off diagram worth sharing. Unashamedly following the Indexed model (what’s the formal name for this diagram type?), it pitches three elements of urban design (accommodation, people, transport) against each other and marks intersections, inputs and outputs.

What I’m interested in here is the way this type of diagram turns boundaries or edges – lines – into space to inhabit, both intellectually and physically. Territory that is usually microscopically small, like the surface tension between liquid and its container – such as the boundaries that bump into each other between a path alongside a garden, or a pavement alongside a road – is ripped open, forming a space (A, B and C) that must be negotiated and moved through, rather than stepped over.

I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.

At the end of all this, when I’m cross-hatching the bits in the middle, I’m defining that qualitative quantity ever-present in urban design discussion: density.

Update: Let’s be more explicit with our hyperlinks: the foggy link is an overlap with some recent posts by Adam Greenfield commenting and expanding on the work of Steven Flusty – see this post also: Foggy, further to Flusty’s five.

Also, I realise now that this was merely a continuation of my previous posts, Vacant Space and Theory about practice.

A quick note to point out that the brief for this year’s Euroclad competition has been launched.

Last year was Brighton, this year your site visit will take you to the moon.

It’ll be a sad day here at no2self when I’ve finally made my way through all the shelves and boxes at the office and uncovered all the gems worth sharing with you. I suspect I’ve got some way to go yet though.

A special issue of the AJ from December 1986 called Drawing the Line – Hugh Cullum, Louis Hellman, Eric Parry, Richard Reid and John Winter talk about their favourite pencils:

(If I’m not mistaken, Hugh Cullum, having discovered the secret to eternal youth, has now swapped his pencil for a guitar and is currently touring the world under the name of Willy Mason)