A film made at Ash Sakula together with Marialena Kassimidi and Cany Ash, about two 1920s waterside warehouses. Treating the combination of them and the natural features of the site as the starting point for transforming the area into the heart of a new neighbourhood, the animation charts the principles of the design proposal, the phased masterplan, and the life, events, activities, businesses and programs that are at its heart.
An animated description of four spaces of performance, where through the passive agency of precisely calibrated architectures, the emphasis is as much on the space surrounding and between the spectators themselves as on the stage/dais itself.
After trials and tribulations, Graceful's sweet smelling mortal coil is laid to rest in a grove, later triumphantly built over, for eternal recollections of the indecent elegance, the lascivious beauty and erotic oblivion of martydom.
Following encounters with Incubus & Succubus, Graceful learns to find ecstasy in his own pain. Angelic guardians and devilish Corbels assist him in his journey to the stake.
Corbels to the right and left, and Guardians (actually a rather effete Neptune, and a very well proportioned Demeter) in the centre.
Graceful (the porcelain figurine) gets naughty and discovers Tweedle-Dee, Tweedle-Dum (the blue heads below), and Incubus & Succubus (the hanging figures below).
See here for the article over on Bi-Blog where the miniature protagonist first got singled-out.
A test animation using rhino's bongo animator, and edited on Adobe Premiere. Quite happy with it, except for the awful quality of the youtube upload.
The video above is cut to half its width by Blogger, go here for the full version The music is part of a song called "Painter" from Momus' 1991 album Hippopotamomus, which you can download here, thanks to the man also known as Nick Currie.
Above is an image of the main space that is in the animation.
What things can be unearthed from the dusty interiors of ancient Hard Drives once presumed broken!
I found this video that I had forgotten I had ever made on an old hard drive that I was about to throw away, since it hadnt worked for about 5years. I plugged it in one last time, to find that it hummed gently, and happily gave up its contents, all of which I had thought forever lost, including this startlingly mechanical and monochrome fly-through of my final design in 2003, (a proposal for a Serpentine Pavilion) for Charles Walker's first year at the AA Intermediate School; a unit that is now spawning a prodigious quantity of pavilions in Bedford Square. I designed an Excel Spreadsheet that would generate all the panels according to a few parameters, and several bell curve formulas (for height gradation and grid distortion, both in plan and section). The next year (2004) the project turned up in a sheet of 'influences' for Jurgen Mayer's Seville 'Metropol Parasol', along with a couple of other projects from other architects.
I do not like the design, but the insanely geeky and thorough process of designing my own parametric 'program' from scratch on Excel was an experience that I do not regret; and besides, doing this design for the Serpentine Pavilion took so long, and was generaly so unnatural to my inclinations, and so out of keeping with a context I loved so much, that there was a whole year of pent-up ideas, and continuously frustrated desires for the site and the programme, that simply burst forth with a vengeance when somehow, through luck, I ended up in Rotterdam, working on the 2006 OMA/Rem Koolhaas Serpentine Pavilion. It was such a joy to be able to work on a real design for the same site, a real design together with a team (notably the eminent Mr Karel Wuytack) and an architect, who were interested in so many of the things I had suffered from a lack of, in Charles' strange tool-based technocracy; namely the pavilion's relationship to the historicity of the place, its quality of allusion and its enmeshment with the events planned to occur within it.
The film is part of a series of projects by Ash Sakula exploring the idea of Adaptable Neighbourhoods (incremental regeneration, in nottingham at the architectural scale), with other projects being Leicester Waterside Adaptable Neighbourhood (at the scale of a whole -extant- neighbourhood, and for which there is a film too), the Canning Town Caravanserai (which is a meanwhile animator of an area waiting for development, see last post), and Leather Lane Stars (injecting energy back into a failing market). 
