blogging

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

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

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

This is of course partly because of my involvement with…

be2camp

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, I can’t do Tuesday evenings. Who’s going to go on my behalf and blog about it?

ecoterrace.co.uk

The goal is to substantially increase the environmental performance of the properties and help take part in the progress of the national debate about the importance of improving the quality of the country’s existing housing stock.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project will be the post-occupancy monitoring work we will be completing in collaboration with the guys from Hockerton Housing Projects. In a couple of years time we will hopefully have something valuable to say about the actual results of some of the design techniques and products, as well as an understanding of what it’s like to live in a property like this.

I’ll be covering it in more detail here soon, but if you tune into Radio Stoke this morning at 11:20 GMT (it’s available over the web) you’ll hear my colleague Mike Menzies give a brief interview about the project out on site.

(thanks to Adam Freetly from ArchGFX for his help on the WordPress tweaking and Mat Brown from moblog.co.uk for input on the phonecam RSS… now I just have to create some content!)

BLDGBLOG: There also seems to be a huge reliance today on extra-architectural theory, like Gilles Deleuze. But if students were instead locked in a room with some science fiction novels, or even a comic book, it might actually stir up some new ideas. At the very least, science fiction actually addresses architecture. So perhaps the problem is one of reference? Or even of genre? Or just specifically Deleuze?

Wigley: To cut to the chase, if it’s a choice between being locked in a room with a science fiction book or being locked in a room with Deleuze, go for the science fiction book, for sure. No doubt about it. But that’s not a choice against theory – because, in fact, science fiction is an incredibly important mode of theorizing about technology and about space, and the people who produce science fiction are often incredibly canny theorists.

So the problem in the current discussion about theory is that when people say theory they really mean a particular thing. For example, when you say: what do I think about the use of these extra-architectural theories? That makes sense only if we know what architecture is. In fact, what’s so exciting about architecture is that its limits are not clear. It’s a way of thinking; it’s not a fixed territory. In a way, you can reach what seems a long way away – to somebody like Deleuze – in order to get a feel for how those limits are moving. At certain moments in time, Deleuze might seem to be totally inside the limits; at other moments, he might seem a long way away – but that’s not necessarily a move toward or away from theory. Mies’s famous saying: build, don’t talk. Well, that’s a theoretical statement. He had a theory about practice. It’s amazing how many people quote him saying that – they quote a piece of theory against theory.

The more important question is: which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction? I, myself, would like to be locked in a room with a science fiction book – but that’s just me. Someone else would like to be locked in a room with Deleuze, and generate some thinking for architects that seems much more urgent and seductive and accurate. And somebody can read science fiction and come up with trash – I mean, there’s a lot of junk science fiction out there, and there’s a hell of a lot of bad architecture out there, too.

But I think it’s great that people are reading different books now than they were reading five years ago. There’s no subject an architect won’t talk about. And that sort of restless promiscuity is entirely positive. What’s interesting is that architects have often been informed by a very precise theory, whether technological or political or scientific and so on; but we also learn a lot by just paying attention to the seemingly ordinary details of the city around us. And architects are fantastic at stitching ideas to objects. That’s what we’re really good at.

Architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders.

Which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction?

This week I ‘ave been mostly constructing a 4 dimensional project program charting the route of the smooth space of the drawing as it passes through the striated space of tasks, people and landscape.

Next week I’d better reach for some science fiction.

Carefully crafted thoughts formalized by the act of writing for an audience. Exactly the justification for blogging that I was explaining to my students last week.

A quote from the latest entry:

The forms of the Industriosphere have not pulled themselves into being, they have been put together by human beings through trial and error. They are not innocent, and it serves us to be as skeptical of their claims to functional autonomy as we are about claims to formal autonomy that set the terms of the discipline’s other discourses*.

Bonus: by crikey, the guy can really draw too

(*Rod: that last link is for you re. our recent e-mailing!)

First, a couple of links to recent artforum.com articles.

Hello,

I’m writing to point out to you two articles from the February issue of Artforum now online. One offers Yale art historian Sean Keller’s take on the renovations of Mies’s Crown Hall at IIT and Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery. The other is artist Josiah McElheny’s musings on architect Josef Hoffmann’s interiors, timed to coincide with an exhibition at New York’s Neue Galerie.

I would be flattered if you’d consider linking to either article (or both).

The February Artforum Table of Contents: artforum.com/inprint/issue=200702
Keller’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12384
McElheny’s article: artforum.com/inprint/id=12385

All three links are to their permanently-accessible URLs. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Best wishes,
Brian

Next, more news on the Human League album cover graphics from Jack at submitresponse.com.

Ah, that’s why they’re familiar! I’d have to dig through a ton of boxes to check, but I seem to remember Pritt Stick-ing a photocopy of that particular dancing couple onto the cover of the master copy of a fanzine about 12 years ago.

It’s a single, rather than an album, though, and there’s two versions of the sleeve – the original 1978 issue on Fast has more architectural illustrations on the back, along with lyrics, the 1982 Virgin/EMI just has the songs listed on the back. (I know this because I really want a first pressing 1978 copy, the one in mono with black and white labels, but only have a French 1982 reissue, ‘produit et realisé par The Human League’. Sad, eh?)