Architectural Performance: People Watching People

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.

Almere Workshop

Last week, together with Karel Wuytack and Catherine Menge, I ran a workshop for the 1st and 2nd year graduate Urbanism students in Sint Lucas University. The subject of study was the new city of Almere in Holland, facing Amsterdam in the most recently built dutch polder of Flevoland. Each group, of around 10-14 students was given a site of study in that sprawling non-place, and asked to analyse it's current condition, critique its imminent plans for development (the city is planning to double its population in a couple of decades), research its history, and ultimately imagine what they would propose differently. Exhausting treasure hunts on the ground, intense discussions and debates, and endless hours of formulating concepts and pinning them down to the political and infrastructural situation on the ground, eventually had to be turned into an "autonomous presentation", or a film that would convey, in as clear and simple a manner as possible, their opinions and ideas on and for their sites, and more generally on Almere as a whole. Below are the four groups' films.

Above is the group who were looking at the city centre, and its OMA master-planned core, which they found oppressively monotonous in terms of content, but formally thrilling.

The above looked at the A6, the motorway spine of the city which is planned to be doubled in capacity in anticipation of future population growth. They looked at ways in which by tweaking the 1970s tree-diagram layout of roads (where peripheral roads that join to different centres, even if next to one another do not connect in order to keep them free of congestion, meaning one must use the motorway to access what is spatially a near neighbour), and other such tactics, they could ameliorate the need for expansion.

The group above looked at a large agricultural area that the city is planning to build on, and imagined that a new work-live-eat economic system (including canal-boat markets launching from the site to fill the canals of Amsterdam every week with fresh produce, as well as greenhouse-housing farmsteads, and agricultural solar-power towers...) could be tested in those fields instead of the kind of Dutch-suburbia present elsewhere.

And finally, in the incomplete but potentially interesting film above, one of the groups looked at introducing a network of super-sized infrastructure for extremely large programs that are inherently temporary, like expos, world cups, Olympics etc, making a virtue for Almere out of their rapid redundancy by making the city into an expert in their construction, hosting, but most importantly their sustainable disassembly. This was to be contrasted on the site with the development of the surrounding and interlocking land as a pastoral/suburban idyll of intimate scale, who's qualities would stand out the more for their contrast with giant int'l scale forever hovering in the background...

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A big thanks to all the students, who were all fab. The names in each group are on the youtube pages of their videos. And again a big thank you to Michael Callant and Ruben Deleersnyder for all their help...

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.

The Church Of Perpetual Experimentation Film (full version)

Thanks to youtube's new up-to-15min allowance Im following up the posting of Objectification with the full version of the Church of Perpetual Experimentation, which I had only posted previously either in chunks, or as a reduced and sped-up version which sounded like it was being read out by a breathless helium-addict.
Further images and drawings can be seen here in a previous post. The blurb from the youtube page below...
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A sprawling new church in the southern Roman suburb of EUR, set within the fictitious context of a new pontificate that is devoted to the massive restructuring and expansion of the church, its liturgies and its architecture. The site in EUR is set aside by the new pope as a field of experimentation, where the doctrinal and liturgical innovations being developed over the Tiber in the Vatican are immediately put to test and trial with the practising -- and non-practising -- public. All development in the work is structured around the theme of Assemblage, so that all scales, from structural unit, through to the composition of those units into spaces, and then the arrangement of those spaces themselves, are governed by a logic of assemblage, aggregation, and eventually in time (the project evolves over many postulated years) recombination. The eventual recombination being made possible by each type of space being constructed out of discrete units which themselves are durable and easy to re-use.

The project achieved High-Pass in Technical studies and involved the fabrication of numerous models that were at once structural and aesthetic experimentations, as well as technical drawings, and large drawings that describe the spaces involved, their development, and their implicit narratives, and this video that pulls the drawings, models and narrative together into one complete, architectural story.

OBJECTIFICATION

This was easily the video that I had the most fun making in the past five years, and now that I can upload it in one piece to youtube I can present it here for easy viewing. Its a fictional architectural tale (from 2007) about the forces of tourism and consumption. About how they transform locations of historical significance, setting up tense but productive relationships between a place's factual past, its current economic imperatives, and the private engagement of both visitors and inhabitants with their own version of its importance. The parable is told through the journey of one character who brings to life, and weaves together the issues explored in the work, eventually turning into a sort of contemporary architectural ruin factory. The full film below:

The explanation film below runs through all the concepts and ideas that fed into and structured both the film, and the architectural explorations around it. The previous year I had gotten rather wound up by some of Baudrillard's writing (oddly enough, Im reading a new edition of America right now), and this work was something of a reaction to his gloomy paradoxes about contemporary culture... i had wanted to approach the kitsch of tourism with an appreciative eye. Even though overall it maybe a somewhat despairing tale about the misapprehension of substantive relationships between form and meaning, it does locate points of interest within that ubiquitous way of approaching places and things, which eventually led in more propositional forms to the following project, the Church of Perpetual Experimentation, and subsequent investigations.

These are some of the models, and one drawing (more here) from the work's development.

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...

"Cine-Doche" AAIS Hooke Park Goodbye Film

The final trip (the first without external commitments) of the AAIS group was to Hooke Park, a forest in Dorset owned by the AA, where we inflated our pavilion and spent a couple of days writing, filming, eating and drinking.
This is the outcome, a goodbye to the pavilion (which we designed and worked with for so many months), to the Bauhaus (which we both collaborated with, and studied), and to the AAIS (for which we were the test Bunnies).
Made with Catharine Patha, Kate Mactiernan, Parastoo Anoushehpour, and Takako Hasegawa.

And a big thankyou to the bemused but ever-helpful Jean-Francois.

Monument to Porcelain 1

The version below is cut to half its width by blogger, go here for the full version

DomestiCity: Conclusion of Unit1

Unit 1 of the 2009 Summer School concluded with one film, presented while the students sat on a long table in front of the audience, drawing in the light of the projection above them, a final concluding storyboard/mindmap of their experience, which, as the film finished was presented to the jurors sitting directly in front of the table.

the students drawing during the screening of the film, which was projected just over their heads.

Part 1 of the Film:

Part 2 of the Film:


The storyboard

They worked in three separate teams filming and editing footage, while one member of each team represented the rest in daily meetings in which the overall narrative was gradually worked out, which then defined further work in image drawing, animation making, and sound editing for each of the teams.

Heres a little, silly, "outtake film"

Thank you especially to Peter Carl and Catharine Patha for your interest in the work and your insightful comments as the students presented for the last time, and, of course, thank you students:

Nathaniel Bengio
Alicja Chola
Noa Gonzales
Rachel Delargy
Cecilia Hui
Maria Koufalioti
Jan Ledwon
Vanessa Mitrapanou
Lap Fat (Morris) Ngai
Sandy Stuchfield
Chun Ping Yip
Taylor Zhou
Daria Tarawneh

DomestiCITY: AA Summer School Unit 1 Introduction

This is the Presentation that Marie Isabel de Monseignat and I will be making day after tomorrow to the AA's Summer School's students, hoping that it will be interesting enough for them to choose.
Bring on the Domestic-in-the-City!

Naughty Gordon...

Subjective Cartographies

This is the whole of the film which "Two Men and Their Monuments" is from. It explores (in a fun, collaborative fashion) the notion that a city and its physical fabric can be spatially mapped from a perspective other than the quantitative analysis of its statistised components. A sort of literary cartography, an urban plan in which the legend would correlate and compare densities of footfall and the prices of available rent-controlled accomodation in any area equally with the relative quality of its outlets selling japanese cat-food brands... it is half in french, half in english

3 Recollections from within the crowd

This is the film of overlapping narratives from within the audience space of an auditorium. It didnt really work with several "mes", so the lovely Kate Mactiernan (who I am doing the tables with), and the beautiful Catharine Patha (who I developed the thoughts about performative audiences with), stepped in to add a little feminine insight to the work.

This has been made for the Jena Theater Festival and is meant to be a sort of decorative 'white noise', a background to the reception area of the TheaterHaus which contains snippets of discernable spatial narrative, but which in no way demands to be listened to, rather forming a peripheral and repetitive moving image relating to what occurs within the confines of performance spaces in general.

Recollections From Within The Crowd

A little story adapted from Character I and Character II over on LifeBin
This is the final version of this edit with one narrator:

This is the film undoubled (original cut). The final edit will come at some point in the next couple of months and will ideally have me as three separate narrators in the screen, each telling a different story, and overlapping each other in the way the the same image overlaps itself in this version. The sound will switch from one narrator to the next leaving the last silent speaker gesticulating together with the next to speak in what will hopefully be a visual display that jars slightly with what is being said, but not to the point of rendering it incomprehensible, while adding an atmosphere which alludes to the point of the work: namely the layering of a space with multiple viewpoints/subjective perspectives.

People Watching People

Im chuffed like Thomas the Tank Engine with this one. Heiko Kalmbach suggested that I make an architecturaly oriented graphical animation to go with the spoken word of a text I wrote on LifeBin that is about four spaces of performance where emphasis is as much on the space surrounding and between the spectators themselves as on the stage. The result is this, replete with chalk-board diagram aesthetic, rotating lines, and opportune dip-to-blacks at moments of nice text...

The Church Of Perpetual Experimentation

"The Church of Perpetual Experimentation" was my final year project in Diploma 9 under Natasha Sandmeier and Monia DeMarchi, and involved the design of a sprawling new Church in the southern Roman suburb of EUR, set within the fictive context of a new pontificate that is devoted to the massive restucturing and expansion of the church, its liturgies and its architecture. The site in EUR is set aside by the new pope as a field of experimentation where the doctrinal and liturgical innovations being developed over the Tiber in the Vatican are put immediately to test and trial with the practising -and non-practising- public. The project was developed in many directions at the same time, and while having a strong technical basis which was pulled right through to 1:1 fragments being manufactured, it was also surrounded by an elaborate mythology which was explored through alot of writings (relating to the inventions of the theologians and the presentation of their ideas in a sort of Council of Trent set of guidelines, as well as the chains of consequences and events surrounding the whole endeavour), and many drawings that contained silent spatial narratives. The final presentation was through the film below which pulled everything together into a short explanation. The original version was alot more story-based, but I remade it with a stronger emphasis on formal issues.

This is the intr0duction to the Film:


This is the film which presents in a compressed form the story of the whole project:


This is the Pope's Inaugural Speech that initiated the experiment:

When waking with the sun and then ploughing fields or tending to sheep or sweating in the smithy all day until the sun set was the breadth of man’s horizon;
When the written word was a mystical cypher of which man knew nothing;
When Nature was vast, terrifying, dangerous and inexplicable;
When death wasn’t only an idea -something one knew would happen one day- but was a smell to be avoided in the streets;
When the body was so often a burden of pain to be suffered and from which there was no respite;
When life was such a narrow path of tedium peppered with horror and misery, the Church proclaimed the transcendence of every individual beyond his sores and abscesses; the Church placed man’s life and his death within an inimitable and beautiful plan of salvation beyond the stink of corpses; the Church extracted man from his narrow and incessant toil to celebrate creation and existence, which, rather than being cursed for its hardship, was glorified and illuminated in ceremony and stone. Man was overwhelmed by the intoxicating mixture of liturgy, icon, statue and story; he was convinced through the mysteries of the Church and their representations that life indeed did have meaning, that indeed there was something magical and profound about existence, about life, and also about pain and suffering.
But now that the rising of the sun has little significance, man wakes as he pleases, where he pleases, and knows that during the coming day his horizons may extend to embrace the globe;
Now that knowledge clings to each man as thickly as an odour, as thickly as a smell that emanates from the autopsy table on which lies the dissected, analysed, categorised and preserved remnants of Nature’s mysteries;
Now that death and pain have been marginalised to the periphery of vision, to specially quarantined buildings;
Now that the body is so often a collection of parts to be perfected or changed at will;
Now that magic and representation have haemorrhaged into every corner of the Real, and stand for nothing but distraction;
Now that life is such a vast landscape of endless choice peppered with information, opportunity and answers, the Church must proclaim the transcendence of every individual beyond the boredom of perfection; the Church must place man’s boundless freedom and his unlimited emptiness back within a plan of salvation beyond the cadaver of mystery. The Church must rediscover and reclaim the magic of representation and re-inject it with an amazement of existence. The Church must plunge itself into the contemporary world to find the raw material, the techniques with which it can once again convince man that indeed life does have meaning, that indeed there is something magical and profound about existence: that man’s great plague -the blight of meaninglessness- is no different today than it was when pain and suffering ruled, only now it is impossible to seduce man into belief with only ceremony and stone.
A lot more is needed, man is waiting, and to that effect, on the eve of my election I am announcing the convention of the Third Vatican Council. The Grand Conciglio will no doubt continue to examine our faith in great depth for many years to come, and beyond my time in the pontificate. Taking this into consideration I will be focusing my efforts on the formation of a sub-council which will endeavour to re-engage the laity through a direct, and possibly radical reconstruction of our tangible presence in their lives. In order that the ideas and decisions of this sub-council do not remain as exciting intention imprisoned on paper, in order that from the first steps of this Grand Council we will lead by concrete example, in order that the laity may engage with us while we are proceeding, in order for these things to happen I have set aside a parcel of land in this very city, the heart of our faith, so that it may become the physical register of our will to change.
I hereby convene the Third Vatican Council, convene and chair the First Committee for the Architecture of Ecclesiastical Engagement, and I hereby initiate the founding of the Church of Perpetual Experimentation.

An image of an interior area in the Church after many years of Experimentation:


The vaults under construction with a performance of Spectacular Mass happening below:


The main chapters of the Committee's publication as a monument:


A drawing explaining the sequence of events and developments in the life of the Church (including a controversial visit by Giorgia):




The Technical plate of the church's vaults:


Three sections running through the site:








The plan, cut at several levels, and sometimes looking up, sometimes down:






A drawing of the Spectacular Staircases:


Interior views of a Recorporation Room and Corridor, both in the subterranean realm of the Recorpisteries:


















A piece of one of the Mausochapeleum towers:






A model of the Altar-floats that move around the Spectacular Staircases celebrating Mass:






One of the Climbing-Frame chandeliers, and Building-Block columns in the Multi-Nave area:










These are some of the models through which I developed the structural integrity of the vaulting system of the church and aligned their decorative schemes (tiling and profile carving) with that logic:
























Two voussoirs were taken from one of the vaults and built out of Travertine in collaboration with Porcelli-Marmi in Pietrasanta, Tuscany:










The landscape of the Spectacular Staircases that run through the church were made by Cordek with a huge milling machine into an 8metre long foam sculpture which was shipped to the AA in London as the base for our unit's end of year exhibition:






Everyone painting the foam in Bedford Square:







The final crazy exhibition. We called the landscape the "Altar", there was a space underneath it called the "crypt" and the wall of images was the "Iconostasis". For better images see the AADIP9 blog .

Altar, Crypt and Exhibition headers:






The exhibition:




In October there was the AAHonours exhibition and this was my display (with my mother watching the movie, and thats me talking to Jake Choi in the second pic):