The Production of Architecture (or is architecture getting easier?)

The recent preoccupation with bespoke automated production processes, like 3D printing and other forms of CADCAM could lead to the conclusion that Architecture is getting easier.  For sure, it is easier than ever to produce a model of just about any form that can be imagined.  Brick-laying machines make no differentiation between a flat wall and the three-way curving brick forms that pushed the craft of bricklaying during the 'Amsterdam School' period of the early 20th Century, for example.

Wall, A. Robot

In Architecture school, model-making is a key pedagogical tool, but 3D printing is becoming so fast and cheap, it is a fair question as to why we still bother making models by hand. Working with a material, finding its limitations and responding (either by changing material, or adjusting the spatial idea) pushes an individual interest in spatial forms where the process of production is inherent in the architectural form.  This results in engaged Architecture: that which has a conversation with the world.  Its not to say that unconstrained form-making doesn't have a role in this; it does, but always as part of a wider conversation, otherwise its merely rhetorical.

Plaster cast of the ceiling of a Boromini church by UEL Diploma student.  More here

I recently started learning Rhino after having spent a lot of time struggling with 3D studio, AutoCAD and even Sketchup, which I find perversely difficult to use.  Rhino is like a breath of fresh air: its so easy and quick, one wonders why other software even exists.  Literally anything seems possible and when it becomes as easy to draw a non-uniform curve as a straight line, the choice between the two becomes a decision; there is no longer a default (and I haven't even started with Grasshopper yet).  Nonetheless, a line still represents something: normally a material set in space toward a given function (which may be purely architectural).  The conversation between these two positions is what makes new capabilities exciting.  What leaves me cold is when one drives the other.  To pick an obvious example, Zaha's buildings tend to incorporate furniture also designed by her, because ordinary furniture is the wrong shape (or is it the building?).  Its clear when you step into (at least some) of her buildings, that they inhabit another world and this is the vision that many enjoy in her work.  For me, it lacks tolerance though and it feels like an architecture of disengagement. Zaha is surely enjoying these new capabilities and for her, architecture does seem to be getting easier.

Back in the studio, though our students are developing extraordinary conversations between new and traditional capabilities and techniques.  Diploma Unit 6, run by Isaie and Gilles are exploring the interactions between different systems of production: 3D printing, plaster casting, sculpting and layering; Degree Unit C (Klara and Satoshi) are using 3D routers to develop brick moulds for traditional casting that explore these new capabilities at the component scale; Diploma Unit 11 (Jamie and Colin) are using traditional plaster casting to understand the form and articulation of Lutyens' buildings in a way that still can't be achieved with a 3D printer.  In all of these, the uncertainty of outcome is key to the process: the process learns from its product and vice versa.

Degree Unit C

Diploma Unit 6

Diploma Unit 11

All this takes us back to the likes of Karl Marx, William Morris, Henri Lefebvre: we cannot escape our social relationship with the making of our environment.  New capabilities are both a blessing and a curse: they allow new modes of production, but also offer tempting refuges from the real world.  Architecture can absolutely transcend function, materiality, time and place, but it only serves a polemic purpose when it engages with these fundamentals in conversation; ignoring them is just pointless, or purposeless.  A more interesting avenue for me is the potential for these capabilities to allow a more dispersed production of architecture: a 21st Century self-build.  That somehow seems more radical and engaged with the contemporary social context.

Greg Henderson said cycle racing is like fighting a gorilla: you don't stop when you get tired, you stop when the gorilla gets tired.  Architecture is the same: it shouldn't get easier, you can just go further. Fight that gorilla...

OMA in Shenzhen

There's a brilliant review in this month's Architectural Review of the new stock exchange building in Shenzhen, written by Austin Williams.  He seems to be an interesting and outspoken character and although I've not seen this building, much of what he writes rings true with most of OMA's recent work.  In many respects it seems like a dumb building, lacking the overt expression of power and optimism (real or pretend) of its peers, apart from the elevated podium which appears a diagramatic, rather than architectural move.

We always tell students a diagram alone doesn't make architecture, but here the diagram is the architecture, mainly because the diagram is so architecturally provocative.  The statements Koolhaas makes about this building are typically diversionary: giving over the ground plane to public space (which means what in China, exactly?) could be achieved in so many simpler ways; but of course the real architectural issues being played with lie elsewhere and as usual Koolhaas will probably talk about them at another time, maybe in relation to another building.  It is this 'dumbness' in which the sophistication of the work lies.  Unlike any other globally-known architectural practice I can think of, OMA respond to the utterly bizarre and alien postmodern contexts in which their buildings are located and occupied.  That they manage to make an architecture linking at once the ironic, divisive and unpredictable dynamics of contemporary capitalism with physical materials, structural and functional performance for real clients is an extraordinary achievement and it seems best realised yet in this building. Like most radical movements, this architecture will only properly be understood in the future, with the benefit of hindsight.  Now, most people argue about whether its any good or not.  This is totally beside the point.  As with postmodern society, good or bad doesn't come in to it. 

The Smithsons in Norfolk

A weekend spent in Norfolk is always a great way to unwind, but as usual there's always a busman's holiday element to any break, so we went slightly out of the way to visit Hunstanton school.  Designed by the Smithsons and completed in 1951 its a stunning building.  The photos don't really do it justice, but I'll show a couple anyway.

There is something pivotal about this building in the way it manages to carry the rigour and rationality of Modernism with the subtle scale and softening of the edges that was characteristic of the late '40s and early '50s.  Having seen photos before, I expected it to feel truly brutal and unforgiving, but the black glass surprisingly has the opposite effect; giving a lightness and playfulness to it, especially in the setting sun.  The grid is absolutely rigid and resolved, but within it, the different scale and function of spaces seem to hang perfectly (as far as I could see through the windows, anyway).  Of course I'm sure its problematic as a modern school, with all that single glazing, but for a building that is 65 years old, it feels remarkably fresh.  When set against some of the well-regarded Modernist schools one finds in London and elsewhere, it suggests that something was lost in what came after.  Our more recent crop of academies seem to have generally either been desperately shortchanged by the procurement process, or lack both the simplicity and the subtleties of this building.  

The Smithsons always had that playful subversive undertow to their work, but to see it applied so masterfully here, it even embarrasses their own later work, in my view.  

'Telepresence'

Today I attended a Cisco 'Telepresence' meeting, thanks to an invitation from Social Life to join a discussion about innovation in the regeneration of a housing suburb of Malmo in Sweden.  I've used videolink conferencing facilities before, but this was definitely a step up.  High-definition cameras pick up the attendees, who sit round similarly shaped tables, with similar backgrounds.  The Screens are arranged as an extension of the table and the cameras are voice-activated.  The link is absolutely instantaneous with no perceptible lag.  It does actually feel like you are in the same room, to the extent that you can hear if people are whispering to each other.

People joined from Brussels, Seoul, New York, Chicago, Malmo and London and it was an interesting debate, though I think more ideas were expressed than fully explored, but there will be follow-ups.  The criticism of these things is normally that you don't feel like you've actually met the other people, which is necessary to develop a kind of professional bond, that then allows you to work effectively at a distance.  With high-definition cameras and zero lag, it does actually feel like you've met, though.  If I'm right, then this has pretty big implications for the future.  At the moment, the main problem is there is only one Cisco office with these facilities in each city and several people had to travel right across town to make the meeting.  Obviously its easier than flying to Malmo, but when this technology proliferates, it will really change things.  Broadband capacity is presumably the limiting factor, but when that improves, maybe we'll never need to leave the house again, to meet, go to school, or down the pub?

Sustainability and the city

introductory text to our MAASD course, 2013/14

Sustainability is an under-theorised notion.  The Brundtland definition of sustainable development, proposed and internationally adopted in 1987 contained inherent antagonisms, that continue to play out today: which human needs (or desires) should be met?  Whose future should be protected?  are sustainability and development (as currently realised) mutually inclusive or exclusive?  The scientific method is giving us greater insights into the likelihood, impacts and proximity of risks we face and whilst it has also delivered technical solutions, our societal capability to apply these appears to be frustrated by the very processes that produce them.  Einstein said that you don't solve problems using the same thinking that created them; he also said, 'the environment is everything except me.'  Via sustainability, we have reduced the environment of 'everything' to 'everything physical' , thus excluding the role of human relations from the discussion. Science and technology are only produced through human relations, however and this disjunction lies at the heart of the environmental conundrum.  

Some of the authors in the reading list propose that the problem of sustainability is primarily a social, not a technical one.  In their view a sustainable world is not only also a socially just world; social justice is a precondition of it.  (Un)fortunately, the (post)modern processes identified by Berman and Beck have already set to work on the under-theorised notion of sustainability, hollowing it out, so that the terminology has become a set of empty symbols, devoid of meaning; yet at the same time these processes continue in powerful, reflexive modes according to Beck.  Modernity may yet provide the radical energy to re-invent the world.  This leaves us the challenge of identifying  the roots of sustainability, as a fundamentally Modern process.  If we go back to the city at the turn of the century and follow Simmel, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, we gain an insight into the Modern processes at work on society as it rapidly shifted from the rural to the urban.  We understand the city as a mental construct, as much as it is a physical one and we trace the roots of these antagonistic forces that continue to shape all of our lives.  If as Lefebvre proposes, the city is a social product, then a sustainable city requires first a sustainable society.  The immediately apparent inequalities of the city lie in stark contrast to this vision.  Minton's writing identifies this contradiction within contemporary urban development and in doing so, only through words, makes it tangible and possible to challenge through architecture and design.

During the first semester, we will focus on this theoretical reasoning, sharpening our critical tools and building our understanding of the history and etymology of an under-theorised idea.  Observation is key and we will learn to look again at the city around us.  Locke's twin modes of engagement with the world: sensation and reflection, will be separated once more so that they can usefully inform one another.  The skill of writing will be developed, so that in 5,000 words, a final report will build the basis for intervention in the city, to be undertaken in Semester B. 

Roland Karthaus, Alan Chandler & Anna Minton

Private public/ public private

I'm visiting Bart's hospital at the moment.  Established in 1123 (yes, you read that right) and now a PFI hospital.  The diagram of a hospital filling a whole city block (incidentally the only hospital which is also a parish) has obvious issues of overlapping public courtyard space with heavy servicing.  The recent Carillion facelift (ongoing) doesn't seem particularly concerned with resolving these, but accepts them as given conditions.  Smithfield market nearby has similar issues,  but there they strangely feel positive,  because the meat market porters are less intimidating than ambulances and delivery trucks and they still use the old red telephone boxes.

Hospitals are weird places though.  Bart's is owned by the aforementioned PFI contractor,  who also runs it,  but is leased back to the state over a long period.  So is it public,  or private?  Who knows, but I've never understood why hospitals don't stop just about anybody wandering in.  I can make my visits right to the bedside without anyone ever asking what I'm doing.  In fact if you actually need to get some information you have to keep pestering people,  because everyone is so busy.  It would be an interesting experiment to climb into an empty bed,  hook yourself up to the wiring and see how long it takes someone to realise you're not a patient.  As an idea though,  an NHS hospital being a graduated extension of the public realm seems an interesting architectural thesis, yet to be properly realised,  maybe. 

When I go to collect lunch (hospital food is intended to discourage malingering) I wander through nearby paternoster square.  This travesty of a public space has clear design ambitions to be an extension of the public realm,  but of course it's private property; But then, so are many semi-public spaces: churchyards to pick an obvious example. Here its the aggressive, desperate and utterly crap attempt to create a European style square that really depresses me.  Many public spaces are incoherent, but few are so coherently bad. The in-your-face management regime is just another heavy-handed nail in the coffin. 

The City of London remains an amazing place, though, in spite of the Corporation of London's seemingly unstoppable mission to turn it into Canary Wharf.  Walk a little further and you find the most remarkable, unique and beautiful private realms open to, and well-used by the public: Ely Place, the Inns of court and the most famous, but never disappointing Temple.  

Last year we had fun on the MAASD course at UEL with Anna Minton, testing the limits of these spaces and trying to delve into this relationship between physical architecture and the ownership and management of space.  This year Anna joins us as a Reader in Architecture and I'm looking forward to digging a little deeper. 

The Homewood

I rent my office space from good friends McDowell+Benedetti and they kindly invited me on their office trip yesterday.  We visited the Homewood, Patrick Gwynne's Modernist house, designed when he was only 24.  Its a National Trust property, set in a fabulous garden and has been lovingly restored by Avanti Architects.  Excellent guided tour; highly recommended visit.  Afterwards, we walked through Claremont Gardens, to Claremont Fan Court school, where M+B have been patiently trying to unpick the problem of a contemporary school's requirements, in a Grade I listed building, in a Grade I listed landscape for more than a decade, then back to Baltic restaurant in Waterloo for dinner.  Thanks for a great day out, guys.

The Homewood was apparently a labour of love for Gwynne and superficially appears as a straightforward exercise in Modernism; nonetheless the building is emblematic of British Architecture's unconvincing adoption of Modernist principles.  It's immaculately detailed and resolved; but it's a bricolage of Modernist invention and traditional, sometimes vernacular elements.  The residential accommodation floats at first floor level, with the approach elevation designed as a facsimile of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie, supported on ubiquitous piloti.  Turn the corner, though and the concrete slab is supported on expressed, concrete downstand beams, painted brown (as timber?), resting on brickwork columns.  The brick modules are tightly controlled and nothing is left to chance, yet this contradiction of free-floating and loadbearing structural languages is typical of the lack of conviction.  Internally, these contradictions continue: its not just the curvilinear elements that the guide points out to us as a kind of softening of the harshness of Modernism; its at every scale, in the architraves and balustrades, light fittings and so on.  I know, you're thinking Alvar Aalto, but it doesn't hang together like Aalto; this is not a clever use of brickwork gymnastics and curved edges to show how Modernism can become materially crafted; Gwynne just hedged his bets.  There are some stunning moments: the main room upstairs is like a Bond villain's pad (in a good way), the windows are beautifully composed and inventively made; my favourite is the terrace, which somehow feels magically light.  The only real bum note is the enamel painting on the main elevation, by one of Gwynne's friends; clearly stretching their relationship.  

Gwyne was an undeniably gifted Architect and in his own house, he created a kind of masterpiece.  There's nothing wrong with the building; its very British and it just indicates to me a deeply unresolved point about British Architecture: we have never really been Modern.  

Gwynne is one of those Architects that you think you know, but you're not sure why.  He designed the restaurant on the Serpentine and the 'mushrooming' (as our NT guide described them) forms became a kind of leitmotif for his work, as seen at the Theatre Royal in York.  Gothic, anyone?

Sustainability and the crisis of architectural education

This piece in the AJ by Austin Williams is pretty forthright about sustainability in education.  My initial response is that I agree with him, but then it would be hard to defend teaching a Master's course called Architecture: Sustainability and Design as I do.

On reflection, the underlying point he makes is right: higher education (some would say all education) should be about arming people with the critical tools to be able to investigate and thereby understand the world around them.  At a time when we seem to be shifting towards the acquisition of knowledge as fact, rather than epistemology (ie. the construction of knowledge), Architectural education in the UK stands firm (for the moment) as an awkward proponent of the latter.  He is also right that sustainability is a misanthropic orthodoxy that has become difficult to critique and this is what makes it dangerous; actually most dangerous to its own ambitions.  It is abundantly clear that in every arena of life, the measures undertaken in the name of sustainability are falling woefully short of their originating objectives (at least as stated - if the ambition is read as 'sell more product' then most are doing pretty well).  Its not about rejecting the notion of sustainability per se, (though maybe it should be about rejecting the shop-soiled word), its about applying our critical skills to try and rescue the idea from itself.

Architectural education appears to be undergoing an existential crisis at the moment; there are not enough jobs for architectural graduates and many of the jobs that do exist won't make use of the (literally) constructively critical skills that we as educators spend five years instilling in them.  Unsurprisingly, people are asking what its all for.  For me, this isn't really about the 'trout farms on mars' argument (that is whether students should be designing realistic buildings).  Architectural education is becoming increasingly unique in producing graduates who can take on the most difficult problems of the real world; combining deep critique with creative design skills to open up entirely new possibilities.  Radicalism has always been an important aspect of architectural endeavour and although this has sometimes had unintended consequences, it lies at the heart of the challenge of sustainability.

So, we should teach sustainability; not as a set of facts, but as a subject for critical inquiry.  We shouldn't undermine architectural education because there aren't enough jobs with the right title; architecture graduates should go and do other jobs, because their critical skills are more widely and desperately needed than ever.  Both apprehension and reflection (great RSA Animate video on this here) are necessary to understand the world and to act meaningfully within it and an Architect is one of the very few remaining professionals who is trained to do both, together.  

Urban Renaissance?

It was nice to get letter of the week in BD, even if it made me sound a bit grumpy.  I also agree with the next guy's letter: Rogers has designed some outstanding buildings: the Lloyds building is still an Architectural milestone.

My point was that cities are very complicated things and the readily digestible urbanism promoted by Rogers missed many opportunities during a period when there was a lot of money thrown at cities.  He's not the first great Architect to falter at urbanism.  I also didn't mean to say, as the picture of Gillet square suggests, that the Mayor's 100 spaces are a bad thing.  Some are good, some ok, some not so good; my point was that the programme as a whole has done little to tackle the more difficult problems of London and much of the better work carried out by Design for London has been less noticeable, like the Green Grid programme, which did really take on the complexities of London's spaces.

Mike Raco and Rob Imrie's book Urban Renaissance? Does a good job of getting under the skin of the matter.  Of course these are not just architectural issues, but that's exactly my point.  I met Mike Raco at a discussion group invited by the LLDC to discuss the challenges of the redevelopment of the Queen Elizabeth park (the former Olympic park).  This kind of cross-disciplinary approach is what is needed to properly inform urban proposals and its something that Architects are not conventionally good at.

To end on a less grumpy note, my favourite example of a new public space that does work properly in its London context is Windrush Square, Brixton.  

Legacy?

It is at least good to see a proper, claws-out debate in BD about the Olympic legacy question.  Oppidan Design's response (a property developer) is a little more sophisticated than simple PR, but it is disappointing to see the first developments being designed by the usual suspects, in the usual style.  Originally panned by CABE, the Chobham Manor scheme is now supported after changes, but it hardly sets the bar high (to borrow a sporting metaphor).

Michael Edwards is right to draw attention to the other side of the picture and his metaphor is more to the point: "We lay on our backs with our legs apart for the IOC and sponsors".

Generally in this debate there is more heat than light, however; of course there will be some positive benefits and of course a £10bn global, commercial festival will have its downsides; but to hope that a project even on this scale will affect the long-term economic trends that have driven wedges between different parts of society in London and between the southeast and the rest of the country is of course ridiculous.  The problem with the debate about the legacy is that the PR surrounding the Olympic bid and the preparations was utterly fantastic (in the unreal sense of the word) and anyone who really believed that such a project would 'regenerate' East London was surely credulous.  The problem for the politicians involved is that its hard to backtrack from this position and so pointing out individual pieces of legacy as examples of this fantasy merely highlights the gap with reality.  We have been trying to 'regenerate'  London since the 1890's when Booth's amazing social survey maps first made the geographic effects of poverty evident.  120 years later, it still hasn't sunk in that whilst the effects of poverty may be geographic, the causes are not and after the same period of 'regeneration' programmes, today's deprivation maps of London look remarkably similar to Booth's.  Suddenly £10bn no longer sounds like a lot of money.  

This is not to say that there won't be a positive legacy.  The London Legacy Development Corporation has a unique opportunity as both landowner and planning authority to create a park, surrounded by modern development.  They have no option but to use the market to do this and the trick for them is in how they can bring a sense of coherence to what would otherwise be a free-for-all.  The land is going to be developed, so the challenge is to manage that process to create a place that is attractive and inclusive.  That will mean changes in the population of the area: pretending otherwise is disingenuous, but these new people will bring money and will be followed by jobs and services.  The trick is in spreading these as widely as possible, but that can't be achieved through urban design alone, which is the LLDC's remit.  

Next year we're going to be working with the LLDC as part of our ongoing LEED ND research work on the MAASD course.  The intention is to provide some additional metrics to help them do their job better.  The bigger 'legacy' debate is simply a proxy for a much older and longer debate about inequality, as has become apparent in Brazil.  This is a real and increasing problem in this country, but we've had the Olympics and they didn't and won't fix it.  Let's just hope for a nice park and a more integrated urban area in East London. 

discussion on China

I was recently interviewed by TCA thinktank about architecture in China.  I'm by no means an expert, so I tried to relate it to what I know about.  Short extract below, full interview here 

TCA: Do you think Chinese architects have more or less the same responsibilities as the western ones?If we want to describe the Chinese architecture, which are the main characteristics of you and your colleagues architectural production of the last generation?

RK: In a postmodern world, responsibility is a difficult professional concept.  We can no longer connect cause and effect with the same certainty as before and yet the global superstar Architects that I complain about are using this condition as an excuse to avoid their responsibilities.  When the Shard – London’s new tallest building – was completed by Renzo Piano, a well-known London Architect, Jeremy Dixon said that Piano should be locked in the Tower of London to contemplate his mistake (the Tower is opposite the Shard and is where traitors were imprisoned in the past).  It was quite shocking for us (in a good way) because nobody really complains about these kind of buildings in public.  I think the problem is a lack of general knowledge of how to critique contemporary Architecture: it is only if we can hold Architects to account in some way that a form of responsibility develops.  I think this relates to the last question: if people are more engaged with the shaping of their own environment it is obvious that it will respond better to their needs.  Although China does not have the same freedoms of expression that we have in the UK, strangely this situation can create stronger debates because it matters more to people.  It is a deep irony that our freedoms in the west have disempowered us in many ways.  Chinese people have to struggle a lot more to be heard, but I think there are more possibilities open to them in the future to shape their own environment.  Architects should be facilitators in this process, rather than pure artists producing rhetorical forms. 

Live-work. Victorian-style.

The Pullens estate in Walworth.  Victorian Tenements built in the 1880s, with 2-storey workshops for artisans built in mews-like courtyards behind the 4-storey terraces.

The pattern has a distinctly Georgian feel to it, though its much tighter of course.  From the air, the intricate, dense, mixed-use structure is clearly apparent as an urban typology, making everything built since look dumb and wasteful.

the wrong shade of green

It seems amazing that it has taken this long for people to begin to realise that sustainable architecture isn't working (see article link below from archdaily)

http://www.archdaily.com/396263/why-green-architecture-hardly-ever-deserves-the-name/

 Nikos Salingaros

Almost no-one was saying this a few years ago and now there are more and more similar articles.  This is what we have been saying on our Masters course for 5 years now: sustainability is the radical, social challenge of modernity; but somehow that's been watered down to a (partial) science of individual buildings.

This article highlights the failings of the USGBC, though of course its a much wider problem than that and in fact the work we've been doing with the USGBC's LEED ND standard shows an alternative approach.  ND looks at the urban scale of the built environment and combines qualitative dimensions with quantitative, so it considers how people use space, not just thinking of buildings as machines.

Climate change is only one of about ten major, global risks that threaten our survival and not even the most imminent (take your pick from desertification, species extinction, eutrophication, antibiotic resistance etc.).  Any one of these can destroy us, but of course these risks are interconnected (as we and our built environment are), so cherry-picking one problem, sticking a gizmo to tackle it on some buildings and saying we're on our way to solving our problems is the equivalent of putting fingers in your ears and singing 'la la la'.  But this is exactly what we've all been happily doing for the last three decades or so.  Time to stop kidding ourselves and start seeing the bigger picture. 

on the outside

Great week of engagement with local residents, employers, public and third sector people on the RSA Transitions project.  We used three conceptual 'models' to illustrate the different ways the site could grow and bring in a mixture of revenue to support the provision of services to the client base: category D prisoners (who are allowed out on licence) and ex-offenders, whilst also providing employment opportunities for local people.

Of course that's a difficult and potentially controversial balance, but there was almost total support for the project from people and almost too many ideas about how to develop it.  Over the summer we now have to turn this huge amount of information into a preferred option that can be mapped out on the site as a masterplan.  Watch this space...

MAASD 2013_14

Preparing the ground for our sustainability MA next academic year with Anna Minton now joining us in an official capacity.

Big discounts available for UEL graduates who have done elements of the course as part of your diploma.  Applications open now - get in touch if you want to know more.

on the inside

We've been using the consultation toolkit (see below) with prisoners and staff on the inside in HMP Everthorpe today.  Last minute panic when I found out you can't take a plan of the prison into the prison, but some sticky tape and card sorted that out.  It was an incredibly productive day, with both groups engaging fully and positively in the process and the toolkit worked brilliantly as a means to explore the possibilities on the site.  Unfortunately cameras aren't allowed in either, so no pics, but next week we're doing the same exercise with employers, public and voluntary sector organisations and local residents, so watch this space.

opening night

The UEL architecture show opened on Wednesday night.  Congratulations to the students for pulling it together: it looks great.

our MAASD / production of place installation in 'the box'

Consultation and engagement in HMP Everthorpe

I've been working as part of the RSA Transitions team at HMP Everthorpe in East Riding.  The objective of the project is simple: to reduce re-offending in those leaving prison, but of course its a complex area that is stubbornly resistant to policy initiatives.  The recent Government proposal in this area is the reconfiguring and privatisation of probation services.  Some of the changes make a lot of sense but the subtitle (a revolution in the way we manage offenders) hints at other problems.  The paper acknowledges some of the potential pitfalls of wholesale privatisation and payment by results and proposes ways to deal with them, but changing both what is delivered and how it is delivered throws all the balls up in the air, so I don't believe anyone really knows how they will land.  Its a new context for us to engage with, though and provides a potential for social enterprises to deliver these services, as well as commercial contractors.

Last week we tested out my 'consultation toolkit' which some of the prisoners helped to build in the prison workshops.  It takes the form of a game, using a lightbox and various models to explore different concepts for how Transitions will work on the site.  It seems to work well and next week we'll be consulting in the prison with prisoners and prison staff, then out in the community and with local businesses and public sector organisations.  

shaping up for the show

Its always mixed emotions this time of year, with all the formal work out of the way and the show to look forward to.  Particularly so this year, without Mark Hayduk who died in 2012.  Seeing the work from Mark's unit at the end of the year used to be the highlight so it is difficult to move on.

There has been some outstanding work this year though and there's the usual last-minute panic to put the show together - its always amazing that it does come together in the end.  Opening night Wednesday 19th from 6pm.

Open debate at UEL

UEL Monday June 24^th. London Festival Of Architecture

Room WB. WB.G.02

5.00  (MA/MSc Presentations.  MA/MSc Tutors will give a short

presentation of their course for 2013-2014.  All those interested in joining an MA/MSc programme should attend.)

6.00   Doors open/Bar/Networking

6.30   Tony Fretton

7.00   Maria Segantini

7.30   Liza Fior

8.00   Panel discussion led by Oliver Wainwright, audience question and answer session/debate.

8.30   Close

Chair Oliver Wainright

with Tony Fretton, Maria Segantini, Liza Fior and audience

“This house believes the needs of public space should lead urban interventions”.

Historically the architects design role springs from the clients Statement of Need/Brief.  This may or may not engage with public space/contextual issues.  The relation between building and context both interior and exterior is however at the very core of architecture. On the other hand, many very successful historic contexts have been created without the intervention of architects.  Furthermore architectural intervention in the past has not always been successful.  Are architects the best people to work with public space?  Should the interventions of architects lead public space design or should the needs of public space lead architects, their clients and the design of buildings?

On drugs and prison in the US, from the writer of The Wire

David Simon in yesterday's Observer.

On a less serious note, The Wire put me off TV for a long time, because nothing else ever came close.  Breaking Bad finally got me over it. 

A manifesto for professionalism in architecture

A little knowledge is dangerous as the saying goes, but in the profession of architecture, the practitioner’s brain is now creaking under the steadily increasing weight of knowledge required to meet legislation, best practice, financial and social expectations. This excess of knowledge is equally dangerous for architecture as ‘compliance’ seems to be the sole agenda of our age and buildings must ‘perform’ and act as ‘commodities’ almost to the exclusion of all other concerns.

As ever more of the Architect’s functions are handed over to project managers, health and safety coordinators and even builders, many lament the loss of influence of a once-great profession. Others, however see a new landscape rich with opportunity for architecture to re-invent itself and recapture the high ground as one of the very few surviving, truly creative professions. Such architects recognise that this cannot be achieved by turning their back on this new reality, but by engaging with it; taking it into their design processes and often subverting it. Architecture is also a uniquely optimistic activity and the subversion of pragmatic concerns frequently gives rise to surprising and inventive ideas and a deeper understanding of the objectives of creating architecture in the first place.

At UEL, we subscribe to this optimistic agenda, through the concept of integration. Professional studies is viewed as a body of knowledge that should be considered and integrated in the design process, helping to drive a project forward. Through this process, the knowledge can be re-interpreted and transformed, developing a confident but healthily sceptical attitude in the architecture students. This attitude can subvert constraints into opportunities and find pleasure in exploring and testing the boundaries of rules and requirements. We call this Professionalism.

Roland Karthaus, Professional Studies coordinator @ UEL

Architecture show

A politics of dispersal

The clear distinction between town and country that I'm used to in the UK doesn't exist in this part of Italy, the Veneto region.  When driving between centres, the sprawl is continuous and the density only increases a little in the urban areas.  Even in towns the pattern is that of large plots, with houses in the middle as opposed to the tighter pattern of houses and gardens in the UK.  Somehow it doesn't fit with the traditional image of Italian towns that are the well-worn basis for urban design case-studies.  Of course the historic cores still corresponds to this image, but very quickly they disintegrate into low-density suburbia and then endless out of town retail.

A Little history from my Italian teaching colleagues helps to explain it.  Mestre / Marghera / Venice is of course an industrial zone, so the population were socialist-cum-Communist.  The region is Conservative, however and the regional planning policies were designed to encourage sprawl as a means of dispersal.  The fear was of a spatial communism, reinforcing a political Communism.  

Park Bissuola, Mestre

Staying in Mestre is of course an entirely different experience from staying in Venice; in a good way.  Mostly built in the 19th and 20th Centuries, it's Venice's 'new town' on the mainland.  The more I get to know, the more I like it.  Park Bissuola in the north of Mestre was today's discovery.

It's not really like any park I've seen before.  In a good way.  The closest might be Parc Bercy in Paris and this similarly contains a huge diversity of pieces of equipment, structures, spaces, ponds and planting, but with a less formal feel.  For all the quantity of stuff, it never feels crowded.  It was pretty busy today, but the park just soaks up the people.  Its not in the wealthy part of town and it has a kind of rough and worn-in feel to it, but in a comfortable way, like a good pair of shoes.  People were enjoying it and its abundantly clear that its a truly inclusive place.  

It makes me reflect on our parks in London.  Many of them are Victorian, of course and even though they are a wonderful aspect of the city, they carry with them the Victorian repressed ideas about behaviour, which can never quite be overcome.  Their formality communicates something about expectations, that might not always be followed, but is never really accommodating.  The surprising thing about Park Bissuola is that there is a strong formal structure to it, but it communicates something different: its a framework for life to take over.  Paint on me, skateboard on me, do what you like, I can take it.  Its a real joy.

Wicked witches

Whatever you think about Thatcher's influence on Britain, it seems odd to me, both for people to celebrate her death and to celebrate her life.  Its the celebrity cult thing again, which makes people behave in very strange ways.  Some people who knew her say she was a likeable person.  It is actually possible that a likeable person could do very unlikeable things.  Instead of downloading the wicked witch is dead song, buy and read this.  I have no idea if David Harvey is a likeable man, but he has written a good book.

Notes from IUAV

Image from Herman Hertzberger, the renowned designer of unfinished space

I'm currently in Venice as a visiting professor at the Architecture school, IUAV.  Over the next three weeks, I'm delivering an ECTS course at Masters level in urban design.  The course will seek to investigate the phenomenon of negotiated space, through seminars and field study work; photography and sketching; and will culminate in a single drawing at a large scale, supported by a portfolio of work.

Negotiate: To arrange or settle by discussion and mutual agreement

A negotiated space is a space where the rules that govern it are not sufficient to define the final form or use of the space. This is a positive characteristic: it signifies that there is enough 'looseness' in the design of the space to enable the people who use it to modify it for their own needs and to assume a kind of ownership. Some spaces in the city need to be controlled carefully, but if a city contains only spaces that cannot be negotiated, it will not be a liveable place and its citizens will not live happy lives. This is important for urban design, because as designers we must be careful to allow for negotiation; we must not design too much. A good urban designer will only design what is essential for the city and its people and not more.

Sustainability redefined

At last, a piece worth reading about sustainability.  Gillian Darley's re-definition of the term as durability opens up a far more interesting forum than the  myopic focus on carbon reduction that has smothered the industry.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for building efficiency, but the idea that low-carbon housing is in itself an architectural ideology scares me witless.  The Passivhaus debate is relevant here: super-sealed buildings don't sit well with flexibility (think of Stewart Brand's 'shear layers' in how buildings learn); but more importantly why are they so often located in suburban contexts, reliant on the car? do their owners eat beef, own mobile phones and fly abroad on holiday? and why are the buildings always so ugly? Sustainability in Architecture asks all these questions, but we are currently answering none of them.  Sadly, I fear that Gillian's definition of sustainability will be ignored.  Carbon reduction is a convenient area of sustainability as a marketing tool for products.  You won't see many stands on the issues Gillian is talking about at Ecobuild, but you will see a plethora of ordinary building products, marketed as being sustainable.  Sustainability cannot exist in isolation: there is quite simply no such thing as a sustainable product, building or city; only a more or less sustainable society.  

The Architects: a review

This year's Christmas present was a ticket to a performance of The Architects by theatre group Shunt.  Situated in a former biscuit factory in Bermondsey, this pop-up, interactive play is in a similar vein to Shunt's previous performances and those of similarly inventive groups such as Punchdrunk.  Entry is through a plywood maze of rooms, acting as a filter between the prosaic environment of the Council estate outside and the main theater set: an ocean liner in which the audience gather round tables as on a deck.

The Architects: lost in the maze

Over the period of an hour it fills to capacity of around 300, with a bar and band to assist the ambience.  The play begins with the four eponymous Architects introducing themselves in dodgy scandinavian accents, one of whom provides a monologue on what Architecture is and should be: a rejection of the neutral, an art that raises the spirits, and so on.  The speech is apparently satirical, swerving between postmodern contradiction: "radicalism is deeply rooted in tradition" and Modernist brio: "Architects are optimists, we have to believe the world can be made better".  During this, the same actors, in different roles are watching us all via a video screen.  They turn out to be debauched, drunken commissioners/parents, variously engaging with the action, but quickly becoming bored and petulant with their artists/offspring.  The space is vast and a combination of sound and lighting effects immerses the audience in a sense of complicity with the main protagonists as they make seemingly random announcements for programmed cruise-liner activities and their after-effects (sorry but the fifth deck is closed after the party whilst someone's stool is cleared from the pool).  In between each brief snapshot, the space is plunged into absolute darkness.  The Architects' children appear, seek affection from the passengers and return to bed.  There is a moment of panic; a fight; blood and everyone has to leave the ship.  "play the evacuation song" someone shouts and the band plays it: "Get off this motherfucking ship", they sing, first in the style of thrash metal, then easy listening; the first and only good joke.  This is the cue for us to leave the space, but split up from our friends or partners into two groups, who then interact with the continuing performance from two different points of view.

Having seen a number of these shows now, including Shunt's own Amato Saltone in 2004, I guess I've become more immune to these devices, so they no longer hold the same excitement.  Its useful to compare The Architects with Amato Saltone: they had much in common, but for my money, the earlier play was far better.  In that event, staged in the arches under London Bridge station, the audience also gathers in a bar, but the interaction begins right away.  People are asked to collect their keys from a bowl, in the style of a swingers party and this device is used to divide the audience into groups (in these performances, you're always separated from your partner, so you have a connection with the other group).  The groups then follow actors through a series of rooms.  In each case, something quite serious has evidently just happened; its never clear what, but the audience has to try and pick up the pieces.  A phone rings, and the audience-member nearest has to answer it and explain to someone where we are;  A mad axeman bursts into the room and for a split-second I instinctively, genuinely feel he's coming for me; one scene we take part in is completely opaque until we move to another room and watch the next group of audience members carrying out the same role-play from behind a one-way screen.  The narrative is fragmentary and never resolved, but the fun is in playing with the pieces and making connections between the parts.  In the last scene we wonder into the aftermath of a party, occupied only by drunk, pregnant women; its surreal, but somehow authentic.

The Architects never achieves this level of engagement.  The audience is too big; we're sitting down for too long and the tricks are too clumsy (men have to leave through one door, women another).  A screen tells us what to shout so the women hear us and we hear them, both being manipulated, but we know they're just responding to another screen.  Most importantly, the nonsense is happening in the now, rather than the recent past; there's nothing to figure out.  Its loaded with crude metaphors: the cynical patrons of the arts, the programmed situationism of the cruise-liner entertainers; a ship of fools; the maze and the minotaur who scares us off the boat.  It feels disappointing: tired and cynical.

Shunt and these other pop-up performance artists achieve some remarkable sets and special effects.  Somehow they manage to avoid the mundane requirements of fire safety paraphernalia  so the audience can genuinely feel lost in the darkness.  They make the best use of the size and weirdly empty spaces they inhabit and by rejecting complete narratives, they create a reason for the audience to engage theatrically.  But, at least in the case of Shunt, they don't seem to have developed the idea with the times.  Architects and artists can't feel cynical about their patrons when they no longer have any.  Instead, their situationist instincts can be put to productive use in the most meagre of ways, as demonstrated by Architects collective Assemble.  Having graduating from Architecture school without jobs, they invent their own projects, find their own money and build things themselves.  Their Architecture is theatrical and situationist, but ultimately optimistic, even whilst retaining postmodernism's unavoidable irony.  The biggest problem with The Architects was simply that it wasn't funny.  Five or ten years ago, it probably would have been both funny and true, but the world has moved on and now it seems as though the joke is on them.

Folly for a flyover: Assemble's temporary performance space in 2012

HMP Everthorpe, East Riding of Yorkshire

View across the fields to HMP The Wolds

The landscape of the East Riding is remarkably flat and open and the view dominated first by power stations, then wind turbine farms, then the Humber estuary as you travel eastward on the train.  The fields are large and open, with only intermittent hedgerows and small areas of woodland.  Its obviously rich arable land, due to the alluvial geology, I guess and farmed in the manner of the industrialised west that makes it easy for combines, but hard for nature.  The remorseless use of the land also leads to the paradoxical situation of being in a rural area where there are few footpaths or land for walking, apart from the roads which are usually narrow and without verges.  The Wolds Way is national trail through the hills to the north, but its poorly connected into the wider landscape.  The result is a strange kind of green prison.  

I'm working as part of a team from the RSA to test their Transitions proposal to reduce re-offending amongst prisoners.  We're working with HMP Everthorpe, a Government prison, located adjacent to another prison, HMP The Wolds and set within 45 acres of land.  There is a Victorian manor house and more than 80 residential properties in the grounds, but its also quite bucolic, with woodlands, a fast stream and small fields that have not been farmed for 10 years.  Its actually a kind of little oasis and the residents like living there, because its quiet and safe, but also because its a little piece of the countryside in an area dominated by industrialised farmland.  Over the next year we'll be working with local and national stakeholders to develop a business case for a facility in the grounds next to the prison, providing training and education for prisoners, enterprise and nature tourism opportunities to link into the wider landscape.  We're only just about to start in earnest this month, but we met with some of the prisoners, to ask them about their aspirations for the project.  Their positivity was overwhelming and left me in no doubt as to the importance of the task in hand.  The statistics are bleak: 3/4 of offences committed in 2011 were committed by repeat-offenders, but that includes cautions and reprimands - statistics for prisoners are worse still.