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...
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Monday, 25 May 2009
"Salon" Exhibition
photos by Takako Hasegawa
I had the honour of organising this exhibition of 'works in progress' at the AA for its Inter Professional Studio (a studio set up to bring professionals from outside of architecture into the aa to experiment). It runs through the month of may and the space has been designed to be used for a programme of events which included a wonderful theatre performance (Erin and Florian) by Vier Theatre on the 21st; a series of 3 conversations about collaboration (Catharine Patha) on the 19th, 26th, and the 27th, with guests including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Richard Wentworth and Gavin Turk; a symposium of the AA's Interprofessional studio and the works in progress which are exhibited in the Salon; and a lecture and workshop by Canadian artist Emma Waltraud Howes.
Emma Waltraud-Howes talking about the development of her work over the past three years
Sunday, 26 April 2009
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
Friday, 17 April 2009
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:
The wall of our studio
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:
Monday, 13 April 2009
Performative Space I
This is the Image which is going to go with my films of 'People Watching People' and 'Recollections From Within The Crowd', in the AASALON exhibition which will open on May 1st.
This is the text that goes with it:
It expanded, pulsing like a dead body heaving with unescaped noxious gases, breaking out with scars, patches and wounds of colour as if bacterial mould and mildew were painting the bowels of this torrid place with the florid marks of a tropical disease. Seats tipped over and disappeared into the folds between columns that began to bulge like the faces of men having heart attacks, swollen beyond use and marked across, slashed all over with tattoos as desperate in their relentless acreage as the panting breaths of a suffocating dog. The stage was lacerated until it bled red and was then hurled over to a place where it lay, sinking into the Technicolor mess that groaned and swelled around it.
Sunday, 5 April 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Triangle Table I
This is the prototype for the tables that will be used in an exhibition in May (the theme is "Salon" and the tables will be used for canapes etc). When the workshop re-opens in a few weeks there will hopefully be time to make around 6 more of them...
The project is a collaboration with Kate Mactiernan.
more after the break...
The project is a collaboration with Kate Mactiernan.
more after the break...
Saturday, 28 March 2009
Sunday, 22 March 2009
Folly Ring
A bridge spanning a finger, gatekeeper to the hand, and a Castle-with-a-hole decorating the landscape of a living-room's shelf.
Wednesday, 18 March 2009
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.
Sunday, 15 March 2009
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...
Saturday, 14 March 2009
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):
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):
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