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.

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.

Part 1: to a degree

In November last year I was asked by a client to develop a housing layout for a small site on the edge of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. The brief, set by Black Country Housing Association, called for an ‘exemplar’ environmentally friendly scheme. A layout had already been prepared by others using three pairs of semi-detached properties but large storm and foul drains had subsequently been found to be running through the centre of the site and they required a substantial ‘wayleave’ (zone to be kept free of building) on either side. Very little room for development was remaining.

Can you continue the ‘green’ agenda of the initial scheme? Could we still achieve the same number of units on half the site? Can we have a plan by next week? Can you note that the brief asks for ‘award winning architecture’?

Yes, yes, yes and – depending on your definition of award, winning, or for that matter, architecture – yes:

We have a tried and tested technique in our office. It’s a simple thing but it’s value is often overlooked by those obsessed with the black/white, and/or, left/right, x/y world of the perpendicular. It’s called, for want of a more poetic name, 45 degree planning. It’s come to my rescue often. So often in fact that it risks becoming a style rather than a technique, but for the moment I shall stand by the assertion that I’m understanding the action rather than just reaching for a result. It’s a simple thing but instead of its more popular sibling – 90 degrees – it seems to require a certain deftness. It feels more like a vector. A point on a line of infinite possibilities, rather than a line between two points of known characteristics (*cough* thank you D & G *cough*).

Three existing conditions leapt off the site plan in that first meeting to create the response above: the position of the neighbouring house to the north, the narrow space forced on us by the drainage restrictions and the north-south orientation of the site. The last one creating the need for an appreciation of the solar gain to be equally enjoyed by each property to both front and back, and the potential heat loss to be avoided in the north.

A blustery weekend in a coastal cottage with pencil, paper and Jane Eyre on the TV and it developed into this:

The crucial factor in the development beyond that initial site plan proved to be the roof. You can see me noodling about with it on the first 3 sheets (noodling – verb: to apply, through subtle, successive iterations, the full extent of one’s many years of architecture experience to a design problem). The result is a type of scissor roof arrangement in which each plot has two different pitches, one half of which connects to the following plot as the houses step back. We get visual continuity and interest out of the wider street scene, irrespective of level changes, that also creates an opportunity/need to deal with the intersection detail directly above the centre of the floor plan. Ventilation possibilities? Check. Natural light inlet? Check. Character? Innovation? Place making? Check, check and (hello CABE) check.

Returning to the office that week I discussed the layout and house design with older, wiser colleagues. Go and take a look at the work of Eric Lyons, they said. Eric who? said I, not knowing his work. The following week brought the announcement that the RIBA would be mounting an exhibition of his work at Portland Place. The coincidence seemed too great to ignore. I booked train tickets.

Coming up: Part 2 – The RIBA and their terrible muffins

Sketches

• Meat Pei
• Quick one off the wrist
  
  

And a few choices from the photography section, which I realise now speak volumes about my attitude towards good photography – it has nothing to do with the quality of the camera. Sadly, with each passing phonecam upgrade, as the number of features on my phone goes up, I think my enthusiasm for the results has gone down. There’s no escaping the fact that I need to find a new way to be inspired by phonecam possibilities in 2007.

Photos

• Farewell T610
  
• Disposable Camera Competition
• Farewell 6230
  

You may already know, from things I’ve said in the past, that as a rule, I tend to get excited by process. The cause rather than effect. So, as a rule, I’m not a big fan of rules of form that prejudice the final effect before you’ve fully understood the cause.

Rules can be broken. Standing on one of the upper levels of the foyer under the Pyramide at the Louvre with sketchbook in hand, I realised that I was looking at a pattern book. A pattern book of formal effects that you could point at and say, I’ll have a bit of this, a touch of that and smattering of the other.

So here it is, the I.M. (Meat) Pie Pei. It’s got the lot.

If I were Rod McLaren I’d tell you that you could visit this location by standing at the base of Nelson’s Column.

See it in full colour in the Paris photo set.

Watch for it when The Da Vinci Code movie is released in a few weeks.

Related entries: The Dark Arts.

(link) [sketchmore - eversion's Tagged Photos]

(link) [sketchmore - eversion's Tagged Photos]

I think I need some practice.

Notes dump on the reverse as future reminder – book to add to wish list and details of a phonecam competition.

One building standing alone in the countryside is experienced as a work of architecture, but bring half a dozen buildings together and an art other than architecture is made possible. Several things begin to happen in the group which would be impossible for the isolated building. We may walk through and past the buildings, and as a corner is turned an unsuspected building is suddenly revealed. We may be surprised, even astonished (a reaction generated by the composition of the group and not by the individual building).

…

In fact there is an art of relationship just as there is an art of architecture. Its purpose is to take all the elements that go to create the environment: buildings, trees, nature, water, traffic, advertisements and so on, and weave them together in such a way that drama is released. For a city is a dramatic event in the environment.

…

We turn to the faculty of sight, for it is almost entirely through vision that the environment is apprehended.

In exactly the same way that Thom Mayne¹ isn’t, Cullen is interested in the formal appreciation of the city. If Jane Jacobs – writing her introduction to Death and Life of Great American Cities in the same year (1959) as Cullen was writing his – writes solutions to the social/cultural problems of urbanity; Gordon Cullen sketches solutions to the formal/visual problems.

His proposals are categorized under three main titles: Optics (or Serial Vision), Place and Content. In an effort to better understand his principles and simultaneously revitalize the somewhat neglected sketches category here on no, too self, I’m going to try and explain a few using drawings. As a homage to the originals, they’ll be in a Cullenesque stylee, except I’ll be using Photoshop instead of Letratone.

First up will be examples of Place.

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…

Sketch 1: Glebe Place (sight of the previous postcard entry):

showing (click image for flickr notes),

fluctuation: ‘…the stimulation of our sense of position through moving from the wide to the narrow and out again into some fresh space…’

closure: ‘…the creation of a break in the street which, whilst containing the eye, does not block out the sense of progression beyond…’

notes:
1. winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize – see his lecture at architecture-radio.org for more on his interest in process rather than form: Part 1 | Part 2.