Leicester Waterside Adaptable Neighbourhood

A short film I made together with Marialena Kassimidi and Simon Rochowski over at AshSakula, for the Moving Architecture conference at the Building Centre on the 8th September that was focussed on adaptability in Architecture and Urbanism. The film was shown following a presentation about the theory, genesis and current state of the project by Cany Ash.

Graceful Gets Indecent

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.

His journey shall continue...

Exquisite Souvenirs: Madam Studio at AA Tel Aviv Visiting School 2010

Marco Ginex and I taught a unit at this year's Architectural Association Visiting School at Tel Aviv university -a 10day workshop- with a brief whose starting point was a found drawing -a large ice-flow survey map of Alexander Island in Antarctica- which was cut into a grid of smaller maps for the students to use as a starting point for their projects. The students were not told what the map was representing, but its rich layers of information necessarily implied the presence of some sort of organising legend, and they were invited to invent their own, but of a twofold kind: first a mythic legend that described a scenario, at a given scale, in the place they imagined to be defined by the various lines on the drawing, and only secondly a quantitative legend that elaborated the form and delineations of that places contents. A process of manual and digital collaging and layering, together with story-writing helped them to enrich their given square in their own way, as well as developing techniques that were immediately taken up in 3d models and larger drawings, culminating in their final, conclusive Souvenirs. 

The Intro to the brief is below.

^ before and after the "storm" by Dori Sagan

EXQUISITE SOUVENIRS: GATEWAYS TO THE PLACES BEHIND THE MAPS

“After a tumultuous night traversing strange lands full of wondrous halls, bedecked both with maidens and vaults in equal profusion, as well as terrifying precipices criss‐crossed by folding bridges and twisted towers, David awoke to the sight of the ancient and inscrutable map he kept across from his bed, and about which he had always wondered as to its referents, realising that once again he must have been speculating in his sleep as to the worlds contained therein, until as he rolled over to sleep again, he found a strange object under his sheets which had not been there before, a white confection of forms that could only have come from where he had just awakened. ”

Maps, scientific surveys, even the most pedestrian ones, contain legends and myths. It is in their perfect abstract clarity, their utter extraction of detail and digression that they stimulate our instinct to embellish, elaborate, imagine. And so as contemporary archaeologists of the map, the story, and the machine, we will construct architectural souvenirs of the worlds that we see existing in the interstices of representational abstraction. We will create strange physical artefacts that summarise an imagined hinterland, and which together act as a gateway to a lost/just‐discovered world.

Above are Dori's three stages. The colourful model was his interpretive stage, leading to the black and white drawing that became the map of his storm-space, a detritus laden landscape watched over by huge rusting watch-towers, of indeterminate occupancy, that was drawn up in the two first drawings (and others not shown that depict a full sequence), and modeled through the folded and laser-cut model above.

Noga Smerkowitz's project, which is also the purple-and-yellow model at the bottom, repeated a set of motifs, including a rotated oval, extruded sine and cosine waves, and the curvilenear profiles of topography, across three scales simultaneously: that of the ritual cultic object, that of a building, and that of the landscape. So that her legend was defined by intermingling and cross-referencing objects like the one above which was both a religious object, as well as a vast architectural intervention (purple and yellow model below), and the shape of the ground on which all of these sit.

This colourful beast is Yasmin Schmidt's psychedelic cavern of lurid melancholy, which she navigated through by creating a comic strip that follows the journey of a prototypical subject of this over saturated enviroment, who begins high up surveying the lay of the land, but who unfortunately ends up tumbling helplessly, and endlessly, through the fractal-like fronds of yellow perspex.

Nitzan Sharon produced one piece of a larger game that he was designing on his computer, a three dimensional puzzle garden consisting of grottoes, waterfalls, follies, avenues, and paddocks contained within various cubes whose sides rotate to match up with the sides of their adjacent element, becoming something different depending on which way up they are.

The six images above are of Noa Kedar's exploration of how images and models can simultaneously be seen to be of a vast scale, whilst also being apparently tiny, a bit like the strange scenes one sometimes sees under the microscope where it is not only palpable that there are whole worlds within the head of a pin, but that they look very similar to lunar landscapes, forests, cities...

Below is the intermediate scale of Noga's rotated oval, where the landscale penetrates the interior of what was once able to fit in the plam of a hand, and creates a cascade of iconographic terraces.

A big thank you to all the students, to Chris Pierce for organising the programme, Chris Matthews and Aaron Sprecher for their support, Ruth Kedar and Arthur Mamou-Mani for being so much fun and such inspirations, and to Eran Neuman for bringing the AA in.

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.

An Other Place

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

Things that Lurk in old Hard Drives: Design for Serpentine Pavilion 2003

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.

Unit 6 of the AA Summer School 2008

Marie Isabel De Monseignat and I taught Unit6 in last year's Summer School. The theme for the year was "London Disasters", and our brief proposed to create a Factory for the Recycling of London's discarded passe architecture (a form of disaster prevention). We wanted a brief that would allow the students to bounce backwards and forwards between zany story-making, fun sessions of impromptu designing, and periods of serious discussion and debate and deliberation about the points where their work was navigating through interesting and relevant topics. Each student spent a week on an individual project, which was then critiqued in an internal jury. That work was then concluded while the whole unit embarked on pulling their individual thoughts and designs into one working factory.

This is most of the Introduction which we played for all the students on the first day of the Summer School, the other bit being an explanation of the schedule and way of working (so i left that out). Students watched all 6 Units present, and then filled in ballot papers to choose the unit they wished to attend... as you can see we were extremely fortunate with the students who chose us:


These are some images of the final model (scale 1:50), and the final drawing, which were the vehicles through which the students combined their disparate ideas into one functioning project... it was very interesting to watch how the group production of these drawings and models ingnited several discussions which kept running (and nourishing) all the way through the course and culminated in a couple of rather long, tiring, but ultimately fascinating debates which tied-up the unit's work in a way that showed how engaged everyone had been, how the students had really been drawn into the work and the collaboration both intellectually and emotionally, which all resulted in a sort of strangely ecstatic mood by the time we made our final presentation, a mood which I took as resulting from the feeling that together the group had produced something that could never have been done separately, a sort of bond of successfully materialised creativity.

The whole model of the factory

The whole final drawing

a zoomed in area of the final drawing

a zoomed in area of the final drawing

image of the factory in the site, with reclamation-copter leaving to go and fetch passe fragments...

reclamation-copter carrying Dimitar's recombined product

Students working on final model



This was the unit just after presenting in the mid-Jury. You can see the collaboration on the model has begun in teams of four to each part, and the individual projects are on the wall to the left...

A film of a small part of the final Jury presentation, which we made into a bit of a performance, costumes and all:

everyone just after the presentation

The wall of our studio

The students' rather forbidden way of saying thank you

me and marie after the last dinner/drinks

We also exhibited the unit's work in a month long exhibition at the AA in October of the same year. Here are the only surviving images:

And a random addition (it was on one of the films, and you can see me all dressed up for the final presentation at the end), me and marie visiting our Diploma 9 Projects Review exhibition, which used as a base the stairs from my Church of Perpetual Experimentation project: