F A B R I C A T I O N

Some old drawings

 

Close up

Photos from Dungeness

Sites of Learning

I nearly accepted an offer from Ravensborne College in 2002. Earlier the same day I had my interview at London Met’s Spring House on Holloway Road (then University of North London) before travelling to slumbering Chislehurst where Ravensbourne’s campus was then. As a prospective student I remember being lead around a lateral cluster of studios, and it being very bright inside from the patent glazing. This made me feel very naked as I was ushered though large paint spattered spaces. Looking on Flikr at photos of it now, it could be an Alvar Aalto building - which of course I would not have concluded in my pre-architectural education days.

 

Spring House on the other hand was an intense beast. Holloway road was terrifying and the building seemed purposefully designed for collisions. Two unpredictable sets of double doors the first obstacle, then an abrupt left turn onto the solid, yet precarious flight of stair. These stairs have always made me feel uncomfortable, especially the uninviting crude steel handrail fixed onto cast concrete. When at the top of the first flight you will more often than not bump into someone you know, but can also quickly asses the activities of the two first year studios to either side. Once into the open warehouse spaces there is nearly always a crit happening that you will need to duck around. But all the same, the place had tutors and students and ideas that made me feel uncomfortable in an array of ways I knew I could learn from.

 

Both Spring House and the old Chislehurst campus (from memory) seemed to have creative authenticity. No precious decoration, mostly white paint on blocks or concrete - precisely how I expected to study, no oak panelled study rooms for me.

 

So it was the location that swung it, uneven pavements and buses rattling up the A1. The density of the buildings, and lack of pointless open space –which was strangely appealing, after coming from the diagrammed sprawl of Basildon.

 

The location of Ravenborne’s new North Greenwich campus by Foreign Office Architects is again tethered it into my space memory more than its appearance. Approach and journey are just as important. Travelling to its South of the river location from Poplar meant negotiating flyovers and submerged roundabouts on foot before boarding a bus under the Blackwall Tunnel where a narrow pavement petered into a kerb, to meet a concrete trench face. It was exhilarating and an adventure, the murky industrialised atmospheres of the two territories joined by the burrow.

 

Coming back to above ground level, the bus circled towards the giant Millennium Dome to a colourful collection of buildings. The Rave Building (as it is branded) sits next to two empty large curved office blocks that are a mix of glass and jumbled silver oblongs. They look nearly interesting, but really are not. The Rave (I hate calling it that) has facades that clatter with reptilian patterns. But the riot happening at skin level is just scenery ready to fold in on itself.  

 

Inside the propped up sensation continues with barren décor and wasteful atrium, the absence of a reception desk and flat entry makes the floor plan an unanchored tin pocket. Flexibility I would assume is FOA’s rational for it being so unceremonious. The many swirling porthole windows are larger onto the foyer area, but make the façade seeming even more flimsy. One clever trick is how the reveals of the round windows are highlighted with a bright dot applied like makeup to mimic a sun glint, making the building a literal interpretation of the 3d rendered model.

 

As I was leaving the building, an event at the millennium dome was just finishing and people headed towards the transport interchange. The Rave is so close to the Dome that it becomes part of its estate. Both buildings do have some shared interests and I can imagine that all students will do at least two projects on it. But art and design education relies on more than a proximity to a large tent. The attitude that the Rave building imparts is slick, yet has an emphasis on the virtual, internet based avenues open to designers (with limited off site workshops and no library - as the Dean prefers a paperless ebook archive). On the colleges website an outline to its BA Architecture course says;

 

‘Architects design and execute construction for a range of projects. From the Olympics to shopping malls to airports and corporate spaces, you could find yourself working on a number of challenging and invigorating projects.’

 

Quite a sorry summary of an Architects role but also reveals some more about the attitude if the college. Maybe this is an explanation of the end product – a building that will look great on its website.

Hari

 

The piece Hari written by the travel writer Bruce Chatwin was my favourite thing in the John Pawson exhibition. I remember Pawson’s dreamy white veiled room and his models and razor sharp photographs, but this one page from a typewriter (complete with crossing out) became a looking glass into Pawson’s interiors. It described the Japanese idea of poverty or more correctly, the burden of possessions. And Chatwin’s explanation of the weightlessness of Hari, was like a riddle in which poverty, burden and lightness weave a funny game and make humorous, untroubled prose.

 

The concept of Hari also appears in the Indian Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. It is used to summon the gods Krishna or Vishnu. Like its Japanese use Hari is still associated with the removal of burden and translates as ‘he who steals, or takes away’ referring to how Krishna takes away all distress and anxieties.

 

Chatwin was a client of Pawson in the mid 80’s when he refurbished his 45 square meter apartment. Chatwin was often away and had amassed a lot of stuff, yet his brief to Pawson was for a simpler way of living. Without photos available, a sketch from Pawson’s memory shows a square plan with an entrance corridor running along one side. From here the kitchen and then  the living room are entered. At the end of the corridor is simple storage - wardrobes maybe. The bedroom is barely larger than a single bed, but it seems to work. Living space and bedroom have windows so we can guess they are light, and smaller toilet and shower rooms fit into this cellular scheme. Modest yet refined, it suited him.

 

Pawson, when interviewed in Domus in 2007 mentions that he prefers to have Chatwin write about his spaces than to have them photographed sometimes. The interviewer Federico Tranfa also mentions that Chatwin used to list out his possessions. This was mostly done as an exercise to arrange transportation around the world - with some of his more elaborate lists including a dried chameleon, and the eardrum of a lion.

It is interesting the pause between aspiration and achievement, dream and sensation. Were Chatwin's lists of bizarre artifacts clues of a life he wanted absolution from, calling on Pawson for an architectural exorcism? Without seeing photos or being able to visit the apartment, pure speculation can be the only guide - but it would be fascinating to know how Chatwin lived here.  

The minimalist interior has been eschewed by designer stores to mean luxury. Almost in an obscene rehearsal of Hari, a style copied to become a mutant antithesis. Transcendence  with a comedown, decadent delirium leading to Hari with a heartache. This makes Pawson's sketch from memory above quite poignant, as a distillation of an uncorrupted concept.



Museum of Everything #3

Why is a collection of old photos and stuffed animals so magnetic? Do we covet the job of the hobby artist or collector? Last years MOE #1 looked at the anxious preoccupations of the outsider artist, and this year with Peter Blake as host the return show is steered on a more jovial tact.

 

The successive rooms look at familiar outsider themes of sideshow, dolls, puppets, banners, fairgrounds, and taxidermy jammed into a jigsaw of corridors and nooks to form the opposite of the classical gallery. Its starting point is a pair of tiny pair of cowboy boots – authenticated as belonging to General Tom Thumb, then on to walls crammed with original photos of other miniature people. The tight space exaggerates your own comparative size. Next more photos of varied sideshow freaks, including The Elastic Skinned Man and La véritable Femme a Barbe Annie Jones.  These images encourage reflection on the less politically correct times gone by, but also provide an insight into how Blake’s collage work captures the immediacy of the original material. Blake has an eye not just for the ugly ordinary, but also the extraordinary.

 

Most visually daunting is the shell display; where encrusted trinket boxes and effigies are displayed against a background of yet more shells, mesmerising in their repetition they collectively present a deadpan survey of bad taste, and the democratising nature of beautiful tat.

 

Architecturally the show rewards its visitors with suspense and changes in colour and scale. The converted Victorian dairy has illogical levels and openings, which create views to the colourful double height banner room through glass cabinets of the puppet room. Views are also glimsed though the treads that climb to the fairground room, where up here the open mezzanine gives some breathing space in what could be a claustrophobic trip into the lair of an artist.

 

Probably my favourite artist in the show is Ted Wilcox, a reclusive tapestry artist who stitched vivid compositions of pin up girls copied from magazines. Not much else is know about Wilcox, an ex-service man injured in the WW2, who after befriending Blake would sell his work to him in return for beer money. Wilcox uses the direction of the stitches to flesh out the girls, giving them superhuman presence against free formed needlework backdrops, like rag blankets – making them look warm and protected.  In the weaves and swirls of his stitches you can imagine him getting lost in the making. This is especially prevalent in his more cosmic pieces populated with a cacophony of beasts and symbols that have a strange occult / cartoon-ish look to them. His pieces also reveal an endearing ineptitude at stitching faces, the rendering of the expression in the images above is certainly one of his best.

 

But is it these ineptitudes and the somewhat unsavoury nature of the hobby artist that get to the crux of what this exhibition is about. I remember seeing Walter Potter’s baroque taxidermy dioramas at Jamaica Inn, in shrine like display cabinets and noticing how badly some of the animals had been stuffed and sewn, and most of all the smell! After the Jamaica Inn Curio Museum was disbanded, Potters work was sold at auction to various collectors after failing to find a new home for the whole collection. With pieces now owned by Blake, Damien Hirst and Harry Hill, this come back tour shows – depending how you look at it - the unnerving or inspiring visions of this backyard bodger.

If I told you I saw rainbows…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

84 Great Eastern Street

Visited 84 Great Eastern Street, couple of weeks ago now…just needed somewhere to put my dodgy blurry photos.

 

http://84greateasternstreet.tumblr.com/

Oh...and a different kind of masterpiece

MA AHTI students having fun with a bit of cloth.

Favourite things at the AA Summer Show

Some of my favourite parts of the AA Summer show

 

 

Harikleia Karamali

Studio:Intermediate 4 - Envelop(e):Inner Beauty

Intensity map. Topographical reading of a traditional Parisian Façade. The degree of protuberance depends on the level of decoration. 

Harikleia Karamali

Studio:Intermediate 4 - Envelop(e):Inner Beauty

Geometrical decomposition in the local scale. Abstracting depth from the original window while maintaining the narrative qualities. 

Diploma 11 – Micro City Phase 3

"Continuing a preoccupation with the post-infrastructural peripheries of London, the unit focused on the area around Whitechapel - a fringe of the city swayed gently by autonomous development, property speculation and the steady decline of industry. Students explored their designs by borrowing from reverse urban engineering, making and remaking the city through drawing, collage and model" (Exhibition Guide excerpt)

Diploma 11 – Micro City Phase 3

  Slowly Escaping Tree - Unknown

FOUR FATHERS

Cyril of Alexandria

John Chrysostom

Gregory of Nazianzus

Basil of Caesarea

The high Baroque church St Nicholas (in Czech Mikulase) on Mala Strana is known in Prague as the ‘Wedding Cake’. Once inside the nick name becomes obvious as modesty seems not to be part of scheme. Large chequered floor stones spread over the ground plan, with relative sobriety but slight surrealism - only enhancing the sugary colours used in the interior. Columns are clad in fleshy fake marble with glided wooden carvings highlighting every crevice. Some of the gilded carvings are of miniature cherubs; others are of marine themed scallops and plants.

 

Built by the Dientzenhofer father and son team, with Christoph Dientzenhofer (father) firstly constructing the main church in 1703-11, and the interior being completed later by son Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer in 1737-52. St Nicholas was built to honour the Saint and features statues and frescos depicting his many feats (including him as Santa Claus) but also him rescuing sailors in distress, saving women from prostitution by throwing them bags of gold, and reprieving from death three unjustly condemned men.

 

Walking down the aisle to the main alter piece, each side chamber contains within it a smaller alter further crammed with yet more lively entourages, as if the one focal point of the interior was not enough.  When standing before the main alter you are leered down upon by four kindly figures. They are the 4thC. Four Eastern Fathers, each one placed in front of the supporting pillars of the main dome. The Fathers - amongst others in St Nicholas, are the work of sculptor František Ignác Platzer, and made in 1755-69 after the church’s interior design was completed. They are cuddly, graceful – almost voluptuous.

 

The first of these is Cyril of Alexandria (Cyril Alexandrijsky) who born in Egypt c. 376 - 444 was the Pope of Alexandria from 412 to 444. An unlikely and controversial Father when his much disputed history is examined. Theodosius II, the Roman Emperor, condemned him for behaving like a proud Pharaoh, and Nestorian bishops at the Council of Ephesus declared him a heretic, labelling him as a "monster, born and educated for the destruction of the church". In his statue in St Nicholas he is seen daintily spearing one of his victims through the throat with sinister tenderness. The character of St Cyril is also appeared in Youssef Zieden recent book Azazeel with won the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

 

Next is John Chrysostom (Jan Zlatoústý) born c. 347–407 in Antioch, now in modern Turkey. In 398 he was ordered against his will to take up the role of Archbishop of Constantinople, but refused the lavish trapping that accompanied the job. Known as an eloquent preacher was given the nickname ‘golden mouth’ for is persuasive way with words. Chrysostom, like Cyril was a campaigner against the Jews, but unlike Cyril delivered his sermons in a practical every day language directed to the common masses. Shown at Nicholas wisely clasping a heavy book, and directing his cherubic accomplice to pay attention to what going on above.

Thirdly is seen Gregory of Nazianzus (Řehoř Naziánský) born in c. 32– January 25 389 or 39 to a wealthy landowning family and also known as Gregory the Theologian or Gregory Nazianzen.  As a Philosopher and student of rhetoric he travelled to Athens, and on his return was faced with constant dilemmas over whether to follow a religious or philosophical life. He  joined the priesthood under the request of his father, and later was made a Bishop and finally Archbishop of Constantinople. His pose of the statue at St Nicholas is one of the most thoughtful of the four, capturing him in a meditative moment of spiritual, or more likely philosophical contemplation.

 

Finally is Basil of Caesarea (Basil Veliký) also called Saint Basil the Great, born in 330– January 1 – 379 Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia (now Keyseri, Turkey). He became a lifelong friend of Gregory Nazianzus after they studied together in Constantinople, so is in good company to stand beside him at St Nicholas. After a career as a teacher and an attorney he began his Theological work after an awakening, and was an advocate of literal interpretations of the scriptures. It is also interesting to see him here aside St Nicholas – the Western Santa Clause, as St Basil is regarded in the Greek Church as the Eastern Santa Clause, with his present giving activities occurring on the 1st of January, the day of his death. The most jolly and kindly of the Fathers representations, he is shown tapping generously his heart, and smiling though his long white beard.