no2self.net

I was recently contacted by some students from Birmingham School of Architecture and asked to take part in an exhibition they’re organising called Made in Birmingham for an upcoming RIBA/BAA event. The request was simply to pick my favourite building in the city and provide a 50 word explanation. Here’s what I’ve just submitted:

Bournville Junior School Carillon

It lifts the soul every time I see it. Bulky swaggering scale, delicate details, bold asymmetry, endearing charm and a machine on the roof worthy of a Dr Who episode. Also, in these dark times we all need reassuring that the free market can occasionally be philanthropic. Different George though.

—-

4 years of twittering efficiency encouraged me to go for exactly 50 words. I hope my fellow architects are equally precise. I’ve never been inside however and this is gut instinct stuff about how I feel when I drive past. To my utter delight it turns out that the machine on the roof, the Carillon itself, sounds perfectly like the synesthetic stimulation of the very swagger, delicacy, asymmetry and charm I’m describing above.

It even has its own facebook page: Bournville Carillon

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

I have to admit that I might not have been entirely clear in my previous post about Venn diagrams, rifts and Egon Spengler. Behind all the mucking about with sci-fi analogies, it’s simply an attempt to use a drawing language that makes me think about aspects of projects and problems that may usually be overlooked.

During the last few days I’ve spotted a couple of other examples that might provide similar inspiration. Firstly, DfL’s Green Grid proposals for London examining the green infrastructure between 6 areas of the city; described in Kieran Long’s AJ editorial like this:

You probably will have noticed that the AJ has been tackling urbanism in a serious way in recent weeks … But time and again while researching these features we have come across the same problem – no-one has a drawing that can adequately sum up a strategic approach to a place. For this alone DfL should be congratulated.

source: Architects’ Journal 13.12.07

Secondly, whilst hiding – during a post office party hangover – between the pages of a Calvino book, I found my favourite author citing dialect instead of drawing as a tool for fixing these liminal spaces:

Lexical richness (as well as richness in expressiveness) is (or rather, was) one of the great strengths of dialects. Dialects have the edge on the standard language when they contain words for which the standard language has no equivalent. But this lasts only as long as certain (agricultural, artisan, culinary, domestic) techniques last – techniques whose terminology was created or deposited in the dialect rather than in the standard language, Nowadays, in lexical terms, dialects are like tributary states towards the standard language: all they do is give dialectal endings to words that start off in technical language. And even outside the terminology of trades, the rarer words become obsolete and are lost.

I remember that the old folk of San Remo knew dialects that represented a lexical wealth that was irreplaceable. For instance: chintagna, which means both the empty space that remains behind a house that has been built (as always in Liguria) up against terraced land, and also the empty space between the bed and the wall. I do not think an equivalent word exists in Italian; but nowadays the word does not exist even in dialect; who has heard of it or uses it now? Lexical impoverishment or homogenization is the first sign of a language’s death.

source: Hermit in Paris – Italo Calvino

I found this gang of hellraisers staring back at me from the pages of a book in the dentist’s waiting room this week, looking like they’d just stepped out of some liminal rock ‘N’ roll space. When assembled in this fashion they were fittingly called The N’Betweens.

For extra festive season points, who can tell me the name of the band they would eventually become?

Clue: IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!

Update: Slade! Although for the life of me I can’t work out which one is Noddy Holder.

Recently received by e-mail, here are some alternative lyrics for use during any karaoke event over the coming festive period:

THE ARCHITECT SONG

(to the tune of I Will Survive)

At first I was afraid, I was petrified
thinking I could not design what you had specified
But then I spent too many years redrawing what you just built wrong
and I grew strong
and I learned how to get along
And now you’re back
With more floor space
I just walked in to find you here
with that QS look upon your face
I should have changed that stupid plan
I should have made you pay that fee
If I had known for just one second
you’d be back to bother me
Oh go now go,
delete that door
move the wall around now
you don’t wanna pay for it anymore
Were you the one who tried to break me with your RFIs
you think I’d crumble you think I’d lay down and die?
Oh no not I
I will survive….

Buildings that rock: Architectural nightmare no. 666

I’m trapped in a building by Satriani. It’s suffocating and claustrophobic with nowhere to stand back and view the spaces. If there were you’d realise there are no spaces to view. An architecture whose rhythm is drowned out by the relentless onslaught of over-hand tapped out details on a specialist instrument tuned in a way only the designer and small handful of specialists can understand. Occasionally saved by ironic Hendrix references that provide relief, the neo-classic-rock juxtapositions draw from the collective memory a tantalising moment of populist richness, before disappearing again in a purple haze of drop-D to the power of ten.

Bill and Ted’s phone booth lands in the foyer. Visitors from the Ry Cooder school of New Urbanism are being held hostage behind impenetrable walls of speed-metal. A flock of students try to mimic the building in the popular new CAD program – AirGuitarUp.

Joe Satriani. Breathtaking, virtuoso guitarist – terrible architect.

(Will the nightmares continue? See previous dreams: 654, 1256 and n=total)

Justin Hawkins, front man of The Darkness, greets the crowd at last night’s Birmingham gig in what I can only describe as a flying breastship. With flashing nipples.

Pyrotechnics, wit and impressive musicianship. Teasing us with the occasional opening bar of a Van Halen track and reminding us not to take it all too seriously by stripping off to his slightly less than perfect (i.e. just like the rest of us) body.

Rock fan or not, it’s a great show, go and see it.

Buildings that rock: Architectural dream no.[series summation]*

To make a building as satisfying to experience on every level – from the minutest detail to the sum of the whole – as Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing.

The feel of the door handles could be sensed from a mile away. It’s place in the urban grain would be understood as you put your weight against the door.

(see previous dreams: 654 and 1256)

* nail this one and there’ll be nothing left – series ends

and this too:

Lagos Chop Up (Honest Jon’s)

The only bit of Live 8 that made any sense to me was the Who’s performance. They played Who Are You? with the faces of world leaders flashing up behind them and followed it with Won’t Get Fooled Again – one of the best records ever made – meet the new boss, same as the old boss – right every time. And they didn’t say anything in between. Everybody else made speeches – the idiotic boy Barbie Doll singer in Razorlight came out with the amazingly erudite: ‘we’re here to make poverty history, right?’ which got him a lot of applause and made him look really good even though, if this was real life, he wouldn’t make it fronting a Stooges tribute band.
Saint Bob bought on an Ethiopian woman, a survivor of the famine of 1985, and made a speech. He introduced Madonna who came on dressed in white, the same as the band and choir which I read as a sort of show-biz code for we’re all equal, and dragged the unfortunate woman all over the stage like a human prop. Jo Whiley (who openly professed to NOT being a Who fan) interviewed people on the front row -
‘Are you enjoying the music?’
‘Yeah, great’
‘And what about the cause, you know, Make Poverty History?’
‘Eh? Oh yeah, that too. Yeah, great.’

The cause is a worthy one but the intention to ‘Make Poverty History’ is utterly naive. It’s about as realistic a possibility as smashing capitalism. Capitalism is at the root of third world poverty. Poverty is a necessary side effect of capitalism – the accumulation of wealth and the creation of an underclass. Without poverty there can be no wealth.
A leading botanist recently claimed that if every nation on earth lived as well as America and Great Britain it would take three planets to sustain us. So there’s the answer, and try telling this to Chris Martin, Bono, Sting, Madonna and co – let’s Make Wealth History.

from wrecklesseric.com

Note to self – buy this single:

William Campbell & Kevin MacNeil – ‘Local Man Ruins Everything’ (7″) (Fantastic Plastic)