Teasing Tastes: Vertical Studio at Cardiff University

This summer term Amita Kulkarni (director of Studio Amita Vikrant) and I (invited by Sergio Pineda and Sam Clark) taught a Vertical Studio during which students were asked to fill a box with a series of scale models. The architectural scenes had to start from found objects, building up imagined scenarios revolving around the articles of daily life, hopefully opening up small ruptures in the students' ways of seeing everyday environments. The boxes themselves, using lighting, and a copious profusion of surface treatments, had to create explicit atmospheres, and eloquently imply intriguing narratives, which could be further clarified -opening up a world of stories and events- upon inspection of the respective student's book, which is used to catalogue the imagined breadth of the world frozen in the architectural representation of the box (one of which can be seen here in pdf form). After a couple of test runs, all the boxes rapidly evolved into theatrical story-telling sets.

Hopefully, in a small way, allowing students to use their imagination to explore alternative narratives of the present, of everyday life and its strangeness, of how to question what is and isn't real, and how architecture can stretch accepted narratives to physically contain some of the freedoms and alternate realities so freely available in theatre and literature, we introduced a little of what Salman Rushdie described in his reading of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, later maybe also to creep into their later work: "This idea -the opposition of art to politics- is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power. And I suggest that the true location of Brazil is the other great tradition in art, the one in which techniques of comedy, metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy and so on are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be. Unreality is the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that is may subsequently be reconstructed."

Venturing furthest into the realm of an entirely constructed fictional universe, the photo above and the four photos below are of Phin Harper's project in which he slays a God on behalf of a fictional race of miniature people -here in the form of a dying pigeon he found and pinned to a cross in his box- and together with a cute stuffed toy he found, and soft shapes he made which variously defy their hidden serrated edges and dangerous sinister hearts with the outward signs of friendliness, he created a buried world of crossed signals, a hidden series of vaults where the old God of the race of little white people had carefully arranged -and kept away from the unsuspecting people- all spaces in the cosmos that contradicted themselves, that were not what they seemed to be, that beckoned people in with warm colours and soft forms whilst hacking them to death upon entry. He had tidied up the universe, but just as Phin sacrificed the pigeon, so they killed their God and aeons later they have rediscovered the catalogue of rooms, and are digging them out, studying them, puzzling over them, re-finding their plethora of contradictions, taming them.

See here for a fragment of Phin's text. Everything white and at the scale of the little white men are interventions by them, passageways, bridges, study rooms, visitor centres and archives that chart their movement of discovery through the subterranean world of the old God's monstrous catalogue.

Below is the box by Jihui Cao, a 3dimensional board game of twisting perspectival grids, in which the Joker has taken control of a pack of cards, and is busily engaged in the process of rewriting the rules of play through his own particularly acidic sense of humour.    

The photo above and the six below are of Zoe Spittle's box, which is both a journey through her morning, as felt by her in her half awake state, and also a fascinating layered space, chock full of allusive imagery and overlapping spatialised stories rendered in planes of delicately marked paper; and it switches between these two states via the addition or removal of a screen she built for the front of the scene (seen above lit up from outside, and below from inside) which has numbered 'viewing canons' that frame very precisely each moment from waking to eating to showering, taking you through them sequentially and separating them in space as well as time. When the screen is taken off the discrete scenes all bleed into one another, existing simultaneously in the same space, both creating a compound and rich atmosphere, whilst also allowing one to meander through the various elements, stringing stories and links between them at will.

Zoe was the student who kept most closely to very specific real, quotidian experiences, using a clear and simple technique of simile overlaid onto everyday routines, giving them the magical quality that things acquire when they are associated with unrelated phenomena and integrated visually, as with the best children's book illustrations which essentially make the fantastical immediately intimate.

For an early version of her text, which actually came somewhere in the middle of her development of the scenes and their arrangement, see here.

The two photos below are of Lingyan Kong's box, a digital-analogue Manga inspired space in which an Android boy has created a whole range of flora and fauna that vary in degree between the mechanical, the biological, digital and analogue, and flat and 3dimensional. This is the boy's petri dish where he dreams his Pinocchio dream of being a real boy, whilst actively experimenting to make it happen. See more here.

And last, but definitely not least is the miniature epic by Matt Smith that all began when an apple got shot by a toy soldier (or rather the apple had a bite taken out of it, and got positioned next to the toy soldier so that it looked very much as if that is what had happened), and the General from an old comic-book which Matt found in a car-boot sale took up where the toy soldier had left off, mobilising many others just like him to take part in a fight to the death with all Apples, all happening in the space between the floorboards of an innocuous bedroom (the territory of the apples), and the world beneath them (the home-ground of the toy soldiers). The box is rendered after-the-event, with clear traces of all the major moments in the history of the war carefully laid out, and through which the jury was expertly taken through during the presentation by Matt (accompanied by 'Ride of the Valkyries' that punctuated the presentation), and which is beautifully preserved in his Book, which can be seen here in PDF format. I would put more photographs up of his box, and others, but unfortunately the Flash card of my camera which had all my photos on it was accidentally wiped.

A big thank you to all the students who chose Teasing Tastes for their 2010 Vertical Studio:

Andra Antone
Sidha Mogha
Phineas Harper
Katherine Hart
Christina Ntetsika
Matthew Smith
Jihui Cao
Zoe Spittle
Lingyan Kong 

Hanging-Masks Jewellery Box

Designed in the same series as the "Mannered-Man-Pendant", this jewellery box is also hominoidal, with a series of four faces with different moods on each of its sides, and also hangs, but here more like a pendulum than a pendant.

The video above is cut to half its width by the blog, see here for the full version

It hangs from a chain, and can be suspended from any hook or ledge, swinging gently since all of its joints are movable. There will also be a foldable armature from which it can be hung  when travelling.

There are two spheres of silver, above and below the main box, which act to maintain its centre of gravity so that it never leans out of line, whilst the lower, larger sphere is connected to the base of the box by a silver bar, which when held between two fingers, steadies the box so that its door can be opened with the other hand.

Slightly recessed inside the door is a lipped shelf, so that the case is divided vertically into two sections, and can contain several rings, and earrings.

The main box is made of 9ct gold which has been laser-cut and then hand-assembled and finished. The bars, joints and spheres are silver.

Below are some photos of the first assembly.

Two Follies

Two small silver objects, one with gold-plating to its upper interior, from a range that includes this castle-bridge-ring, and an indefinite number of other potential variations.

They were both made from hand-carved wax using lost-wax casting

and are intended to multiply, populating the nooks and crannies of a home

turning its bookshelves, wainscotting, treads and cupboard-tops into a Penguin paperback and Ikea flatpack

interior romantic garden, through which eyes tired from the strain of the computer screen can go for jaunty mid-afternoon saunters, wandering over worktops, and between lampshades, occasionaly taking refuge under the light whimsy of a minute folly.

Chinese Whispers Drawing

A student from Central Saint Martins' MA course "Creative Practices for Narrative Environments" sent me a package with two pieces of folded A2 paper, three pens, and a little instructions slip (above). One person had to draw on a third of one of the pages, then jot down any relevant notes or sketches on the second; the package was then to be given to another person to do the same, and then onto a third who would complete the two pages and send the pack back to the original sender.

I eventually ended up with the drawing pictured above (and detailed below), of a potentially extensive series of collected elements that relate to a particular mixture of memories -specifically those related to forms, surfaces and objects- which for me define a rather fondly recalled summer, long since past. A summer that looms larger the further away I get from it, and whose constituent buildings and experiences become proportionately more potent, and full of longing as they retreat from the lacklustre present.

Below is a photo of the 'notes page' on which I made a remark about the desire to reaffirm the instinctive pre-training judgement of the unburdened eye, and drew a quick sketch before embarking on the main drawing.

The pack was then given to Marcel Rahm, Director of the fantabulous Milk Studio Architects, who you can see busily drawing away in the photo below.

I look forward to seeing the results.

"Cluster On Me" An Alternative development above Tottenham Court Road Crossrail Station

This was a project done over at Madam Studio, with Rebecca Harral and Marco Ginex.

We are situated in Soho, and are quite horrified at the lack of Programmatic and architectural ingenuity being shown by the proposals for what will replace the two chunks of Soho that are being/have been demolished to make way for the TotCrtRd Crossrail interchange. A rich mix of music venues, night-clubs, offices, restaurants, accomodation, schools, and buildings ranging from the eighteenth century to the 70s (hilariously the whole development is in a conservation zone) are being lost, from the area around The End and Denmark Street, to the block that housed the Ghetto, The Astoria, Dionysus and Metro, to a whole slice of Dean Street, where the old Black Gardenia, with its wooden stools and oddly dressed attendants (always made me think of Johnny Depp), and Spaccanapoli (pizzas by the metre) are all gone, only to be replaced by office blocks with token subsidised space for "culture".

We wanted to incorporate the capital benefits of both monolithic skyscraper projects, like one Canada Square, as well as the kind of groundscraper they are planning to build on the site, with the qualities of architectural and programmatic diversity that we like so much in Soho. To do this we felt that spaces needed to be found in which there was freedom for a variety of architectures, and programmes, as well as ownerships to evolve on their own course, with these "voids", or lacunae-of-design being anchored by a certain quantity of large, defined elements that would insure an economy of scale sufficient to initiate the development.

^View of Tower at Final Stage From The Corner Of Oxford Street and Hanway Place

More After The Break...

Barbican Film

Below is part of a film about, and starring, the Barbican called "Degrees Of Enclosure". It was created by the Artist Ilona Sagar, with text written by me, read by Joel Sams, and with performances by the dancers Georgina Hay, Aneta Hymka, Elizabeth Streeter, Elaine Thomas.

The film was exhibited at the event Architectural Playgrounds, at the Barbican Galleries, and will be shown again at the Design vs Art evening on the 29th April.

For more details about how the project germinated and developed, as well as a full copy of the text, please see this post over on TextBin.

Documenting and Designing for Louvain-La-Neuve

masterplan of Louvain La Neuve
Workshop group in front of LLN model from the 70s, after a lecture by the head of Planning at LLN University
Karel Wuytack and I recently taught a design/research workshop, to the full final year of Urbanism students studying at Sint Lucas' two campuses of Gent and Brussels.


Railway and Road entrances into and under LLN

The topic of study was the University City of Louvain La Neuve, a piece of Utopic, pedestrianised, Brutalist New Urbanism, from the late 1960s that grew out of the need to resolve (by removal and relocation) old Flemish-French tensions in Leuven University proper. A site in between Leuven and Brussels, in Wallon Brabant, was chosen.

Street in LLN
more after the break...

Peripetics by Zeitguised

A remarkable animation made by Zeitguised, with sound by Michael Fakesch, and commisioned by Zirkel Gallery.

Peripetics by ZEITGUISED from NotForPaper on Vimeo.

An Other Place

Two images of spaces taken from within the world outlined in this storied proposal "Breaches, and Other Places" over on TextBin.