Museums

I like museums, but not so much now they have taken on the guise of department stores. I especially like The Imperial War Museum, have done ever since I was a kid, but these days as I sit there periodically (since it is a welcome and convenient distraction from the university) studying, likely as not, 'Old Fred' the Lancaster bomber, I find myself vexed.
There is a window ledge you can sit on to inspect 'Old Fred' and those who mill around him- rarely for more than a few seconds- a snapshot of the distracted museum visitor, always anxious for the next thing, be they excited crocodiles of school kids or bad tempered old men in wheelchairs. That's the good thing about the IWM, at least it's free, I don't feel that imperative at all. 'Old Fred' has so much to offer I can go on thinking about him for days.
Architects have long taken to the museum 'experience'- including me in the nineties. But why make a Holocaust Museum when a copy of Primo Levi's 'If This Is A Man' is a so much better vehicle for historical empathy? What's with all the gratuitous effects? Or is it that people no longer even know the actual story.
Thankfully the excellent Holocaust exhibit in the IWM has been left intact- at least somebody realised nothing needed to be done- but the overall experience now is as much shop as exhibition space, as much clutter of visuals over things. Maybe, dread to think, so many of those originals have been sold off- the Focke Wolf 190, the Mustang, the Jagdpanther...or maybe just moved on to another branch. Whatever, I guess all the HD screens and so on are viewed as a cheap and instantaneous mode of communication in the spirit of the times.
In reality (sic) it's just another version of shopping, and there is a lot of shopping in the IWM, and going home happily with a 'Don't Panic' mug is certainly in the interests of the powers that be; historically not so much as anti-war as pro-patriotism.
And thinking about 'Old Fred', his original fifty five thousand parts (even with turrets and engines counted singly, and not counting rivets either) his power, his thin-ness, his bigness, his tininess, his blackness and the exploding world around him (a german eighty-eight sits smugly next to him, solid as a rock you might say) and what happened inside him and around him as a kind of living hell for ten hours at a time times thirty (and I know he was actually Fleet Air Arm so I'm extrapolating rather) gives you pause for a great deal of thought.
There is a Stassi museum in Leipzig where I remember they hadn't changed a thing. It was deeply unnerving. There's also one in eastern Berlin which, as the actual headquarters of the Stassi, is almost invisible within the urban grain. They didn't change that either.
I think we should think a bit more about museums and what we really want from them.

Architects and Developers

For the first time we are going to be running a class within our  'Ideas in Architecture' course titled 'Profit'. Profit doesn't become an issue until it is hard to find; certainly the case today, as the traditional role of the architect is not so much under threat as under water.
It's been a long time coming and we've fudged it over and over. Joseph Paxton, as far as I know, was party to the first design and built contract designed to outmanoeuvre the bemused architects of 1851. By the early 1990's, the title 'Architect' was fundamentally challenged, and it took a big fight back, including a whole raft of prescriptions from the RIBA as far as education was concerned, to steady the ship.
Back then I was for deregulation; I thought good architecture would succeed without good 'Architects'; that talented individuals would take to the task who would be valued for their skills, working within co-operative organisations!
But the subsequent financialisation of everything has made Design and Build look a milestone. Today, just to succeed, small time architects have to become developers themselves (or work in giant corporations) that is unless they go to become in house architects within pub chains (apparently these are the best paid opportunities) where god knows what they do other than 'defurbish' properties with  cast offs.
Meanwhile those architect friends of mine who couldn't stand their developers (who suddenly started behaving like architects) gave up the business.
We don't teach any of this. An architecture course is not a real estate course. But we do encourage a lot of fantasy in the name of 'design', almost to the point that it is hardly design at all, but illustrated storytelling. Witness this exchange at the Bartlett:

Prof:       'Put a giraffe in that drawing, giraffes are funny...'
Student:  'But I don't think giraffes are funny!'
Prof:       'Just put a giraffe in the drawing.'

Meanwhile, if you are working as a developer, you'd better put your time into those gross to net ratios. An architect estimating 80% when it actually comes out closer to 75% is, in the end, responsible for people sipping their cappuccino on a postage stamp of 'public space' beneath 30 stories of office space. You can't blame developers for making money, but you can encourage architects to take lessons from Mies van de Rohe, who managed to broker that piazza on Madison Avenue and who certainly understood his gross to net.

Wielding the Critical Scalpel

Apparently there is now an algorithm that can predict with certainty that you've got a best seller on your hands. Whether the authors just write best sellers instinctively or not is a moot point, but publishers will be thrilled. Whatever, it's not good news for writers.

The analysis of best sellers not as potential moola but as indicators of cultural mores reached it's highpoint, I would suggest, with Umberto Eco's brilliant 'The Narrative Structure in Fleming' published on the subject of the 007 in 1965. I finally got hold of a copy after all these years and it  was hardly a disappointment, except that it made me think we'd all gone way downhill since.

At a time when the critical world, especially in Italy, must have been highly charged, Eco manages to be extremely deft and funny as well as insightful. It reads as if he's got inside Flemings rather unfortunate head and started rattling things around, and the fun he's having is enormous:

  'And here let us introduce a further opposition with affects not so much the structure of the plot as that of Fleming's style; the distinction between a narrative incorporating wicked and violent acts and a narrative that proceeds by trifling acts seen with disillusioned eyes.

   In fact, what is surprising in Fleming is the minute and leisurely concentration with which he pursues for page after page descriptions of articles, landscapes and events apparently inessential to the course of the story; and conversely the feverish brevity with which he covers in a few paragraphs the most unexpected and improbable actions. A typical example is to found in Goldfinger, with two long pages dedicated to a casual meditation on a Mexican murder, fifteen pages dedicated to a game of golf, twenty-five occupied with a long car trip across France, as against four to five pages which cover the.....coup de theatre.

   In Thunderball a quarter of the volume is occupied by descriptions of naturalist cures........but the most disconcerting passage is perhaps that in which Domino Vitali, after having told Bond her life story in the bar of the Casino, monopolizes five pages to describe, with great detail, the box of Player's cigarettes.'

So when you are reading Bond, you think you are reading about action and suspense, but you are not! 

Well this is brilliant in itself, but Eco goes further, suggesting that in describing the things we know, and not those we have no experience of (such as like robbing Fort Knox) Fleming accommodates the pleasure of reading, he establishes that necessary empathy. 

Will Things End Up Free?

Will things end up free? Yesterday I noticed an example where at least in terms of utility this would seem to be the case. I was returning from the garage and remembered we were out of what we shall call 'wipes'. I found a generic pack of fifteen for a £1 in the local off-licence. When I used them I discerned little difference in physical quality between them and those I might usually buy, at a far higher cost, in Tescos. If we assume that there is just one fully automated factory making all the 'wipes' in the world (that capitalism has done it's job, and that the owner of that factory has become very rich), that difference is all in complex branding and marketing. 

Of course the raw materials in the 100% polyester wipe cost something, as do transportation costs, but the only labour would appear to be the stacking of shelves! There would not even be administration in a factory that made no profit (only maintenance) assuming that the product had reached full maturity and there was no need for further 'development'; that it was fully biodegradable and so on (like Le Corbusier's purist wine bottles for example). Of course if we assumed it was fully recyclable, we would even abolish raw material costs!

Meanwhile the off-licence and Tescos are to some extent in competition. Those people in marketing, branding and administration have realised that their customers generally buy such things as wipes as part of their weekly shop, not off the cuff from the off-licence. If the products are essentially the same, the Tescos people must be hoping you do not notice their mark-up, and that the owner of the off-licence doesn't bother to put a sign in his window advertising cheaper wipes. 

Since so many of us might work in marketing, branding and administration within corporations, this might be seen as fine and dandy, unless of course you realise that your instincts are being manipulated when it comes to even the most basic of utilities by those very corporations. If people were to get very angry about this the big retailers would all immediately give their wipes away free, and the owner of the World's Wipe Factory would pledge to maintain his machines for life for nothing, by way of thanks, and nobody with a grain of sense would take the slightest interest in marketing, branding and administration. 

The Day After

I figure there are two things that Trumps presidency will mark. Long term, it's the death of democracy, but he doesn't see it that way, he sees it as rather the opposite.
Short term, it marks the moment when neoliberalism has taken the gloves off. Trump's agenda, to make America great again, will not happen, at least it can't happen without unbridled suffering across the globe. Trump is a consequence of the ongoing  failure of the capitalist model, where alternatives to that model, whilst clearly imperative, are impossible for the majority of 'working people' (read 'salt of the earth') to imagine. Maybe it is 'experts', or 'elites' who represent challenges or ways out, but they have become both corrupt and oblivious to the consequences of their own policies- they are precisely ridiculed because their fiddling about doesn't work (see Obama). These figures are hence seen as mirrors of the 1%, and sometimes represent precisely that (see Cameron's ex-cabinet).
It is the middle class, the bourgeois, those who work and hope within the superstructure of late capitalism- the believers and investors in the whole idea - who will feel this disruption most of all. In the pubs and bars, I've seen it straight away. As far as The Old George in Bethnal Green is concerned; 'The End is Nigh - get Trump'd!' is today's message on the chalk board, and it's not that they don't mean it. That's why the media got it so wrong, it was so much against their interests to predict it!
The WORST thing, is that this new proletariat; Brexiteers, Trumpers, whatever, are not guided by virtuous ideas, but by bigotry and a LACK of ideas.
It means all of us in education really have a job on our hands, for this kind of ignorance is not going to succeed on my watch.
Above, a Jasper Johns drawing, one of many he made of the American flag, somewhat disturbed.

Reading Between the Lines

For me what is fascinating about reflecting back on an essay such as 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism' is not so much what it says, which is quite a lot, but what it leaves out. Moreover that once I understand what it leaves out, it gives me a good number of clues as to it's importance.
Straight off I'll suggest it's importance is that it marks a moment when looking (or consuming) architecture becomes more of a concern than producing it in the traditional sense, and even dressing becomes more important than structure.
Further, and rather obviously, that moment when reading between the lines became more important than the lines themselves, and the whole post-structuralist/deconstructivist behemoth took off within architectural theory, and did so with conveniently populist wings, for exciting things like 'sexuality' and 'space' were suddenly conjoined in a legitimate academic book title, the first of it's type many of us eagerly placed on our shelves.
Not for a moment can I suggest this was unnecessary, it was entirely so, but for anybody interested in what got left out, now that the behemoth has crashed, and it's the debris we are looking at, it's worth inspecting Beatriz Colomina's (above) undoubted cunning.
She does not dwell on Adolf Loos sexuality, his predilection for much younger girls (shared by his friend Peter Altenberg) especially dancers, or his two convictions for pedophilia or the syphillis that eventually contributed to him keeling over at such a relatively young age. She doesn't look at his Elephant trunk table and see eight young ladies legs (as I do). Nor does she delve in to his fascination with Josephine Baker.
On Corbusier, she does not dwell on the paintings and drawings that are markedly erotic, even those of Josephine Baker (how she could resist enjoying this remote threesome I have no idea). Neither is there much interest in Le Corbusier's sexual personae, a man whose early life (at least) was plagued with neurosis regarding the brothel and the delights that lay within, and the strength of his erections. She even manages to dispose of interest in his 'five-points' that so emphatically demand 'long windows', preferring to see them as a more cinematic device.
Perhaps such material is tittle tattle, but in remarking upon it I'm going back to the old fashioned empathy that traditional, pre-poststructuralist, thinkers brought to history; the grand narrative and the assumptions that came with it. Perhaps I'm a bad boy to do so, but as I said, we are now looking at a field of debris, and we just might have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  

Serendipity

An old friend sent me this via Messenger the other day. He discovered it when he was moving house. Well it's something I did when I was doing my diploma back in 1987 at PCL. It's an appropriately fragile, tiny, bit of residue, but precious for that of course, and I was amazed it popped up just now, electronically, because as a consequence it can go straight in to next weeks CC3 lecture on 'Populism'.
The statement and demand seems as pertinent now as it did then, but the outcome of pondering it might be rather different. At the time, and in retrospect, it repudiated (along with another project my old friend reminded me of: 'Billboard as a Very Thin Building') those concepts of both both 'space' and 'meaning' I didn't (and still don't) understand. Further, it precipitated (eventually) a long period of time 'studying' Las Vegas.
Now, we wonder at the viability of consumption/consumerism itself as we choke within it.
And it's not been that long a time frame; less than thirty years. Is that time of life or time of man?
I was re-reading one of the essays I wrote on Las Vegas only yesterday: The Landscape of Luxury from Jonathan Hill's book 'Occupying Architecture', a real time capsule from 1998. I was actually looking back at Jane Rendell's essay also caught within, but thought maybe I should look at my own too; only fair if you like. I was shocked; we were all, if you like, just so busy throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But it was a good thought to have had, back in the day, and back then a project could be just an A4 sheet of paper, and whats more it had far reaching consequences (at least for me). So the moral of the story must be something close to 'be careful what you wish for'; it will certainly come and bite you in the ass. Or perhaps, keep on asking the big questions, they might just carry you along.
Meanwhile I wonder how I made it, there were no computers or anything.

Getting Better all the Time

Are they? Well, of course! You might say, just look at us! (take a selfie!) But sometimes I'm not so sure. In some ways, yes! But certainly, if Michelangelo were alive today he'd be on antidepressants, anybody looking at him as pictured in Raphael's School of Athens would have sent him straight to the Wellbeing Centre. Meanwhile, looking further back, to enable that sense of the Roman law to pervade the whole of Southern Europe and way into the Middle East (oh please!) you had to be able to play fairly fast and loose with the concept of 'food poisoning'. Then, when I look at the fresco above, discovered at Knossos, of ancient Minoan Bull Dancing, I wonder at the comparative horrors of our Saturday night TV schedule (Strictly then X Factor) and think just how amazing, awesome, and incredible it would be to see young those young women spinning somersaults over charging bulls ( the business being, of course, to grab that bull by the horns) and further, at what kind of feminist critique might be brung. And I wonder how often they did it? (Once a year?) and as to exactly how many Beyonce concerts that might be equivalent to.
So one dwells on just how our spectatorship moves forward, or as one student put it wisely yesterday, 'even if you think you are making a comment on Facebook, you aren't'.
Andrew Stoane was brilliant last night (CC3 lecture on The Organic) showing us a picture of his fabulous fuse box that even has a switch for 'Going Away'. I mean the thing was just fantastical in every single way, and he made it all himself! But I had to ask, given all the palaver, why not just turn out the lights?

Engine Trouble: The Answer

Well I said, in Engine Trouble (below) that I would have to make a model that demonstrated, to me, how a V-twin engine actually worked. That is instead of making it up on the spot as I had done on the opening presentation of term. So I did, and the results are shown above. I now understand the four stroke cycle once again. It's been somewhat a pain, but hell, it was worth it in the end. You feel a bit daft, over fifty years of age, fiddling with such a box of little parts once again, but there is satisfaction too it.
And finally, what a pleasure; noting one spark to the forward, closely to be followed by one to the backward cylinder on an alternating cycle. It was fiendishly complicated building the damn thing even at this simplistic level, and absolute proof that drawings aren't much good when you are talking about moving parts. All hail those at Harley Davidson I say, for perfecting the bastard over all those years.

Bull in a China Shop

Woke up feeling a bit peeky, a bit blanched, this morning after sharing the podium with my old friend Kevin Rhowbotham yesterday evening. It's not often we let the fox in to the henhouse, the cat amongst the pigeons, in architectural education these days. The over riding considerations are more care in the community. But it was certainly refreshing to hear the old firebrand, 'Yosemite Sam' as I once dubbed him way back when we were teaching at Westminster University back in the late eighties, driving his coach and horses through the polite assumptions of our audience, a challenge to all and sundry, and also rather good to feel the energy levels of the student body tangibly rising to the challenge.
Withered by the years, I had forgotten what it was like, what it had been like, and pretty much everything else in between, all plans were ditched; controlling the beast looked well beyond my means. I took on the countenance of a rather anxious dog owner in a sheep field.
The subject was 'Functionalism' and it was clear this topic touched on something of a raw nerve. Certainly, the tacit acceptance of induction hobs and so called efficient kitchens was out of the question. Instead, we got God, not even a dead God, but the origin of consciousness and that spirit of animation that comes with it, precisely that railing against reductivism. And I have to say it felt good, this railing (as of course it always did and always should in something called a school) not entirely comprehensible perhaps, but a sensation sure enough, a tangible apparition of catastrophe, of total failure, coupled with that imperative to reconstitute the entire edifice as something better.
If only Teresa May were in the room I thought, for one perverse moment, as another salvo rained.
Of course, I suspect the more robust of the student body found it amusing; me failing to drag the subject back to Duiker (1930), straining for jokes in The Frankfurt Kitchen (1926) or offering distractions on Dieter Rams; even offering the equivalent of a physical bone (a Braun electric fan, above); but it was all hopeless. History looked suddenly out of place.
Afterwards we went to the pub. We smiled and laughed and chatted gently as good friends in their mature years do. There is great warmth in that fire, and I am grateful to have shared it once again.

The Modulor

I decided to re-enact just how Le Corbusier discovered proportion above. Actually his was an even more casual discovery, as one postcard lay on top of another on the desk of his Parisian garret. The tale is told in one of his more peculiar but deeply endearing books 'The Modulor' which I recommend to any struggling young architect as they attempt to unravel the secret of something looking half decent. Whilst his resultant fresh scales were intended for widespread use in the flat and up and down, an improvement on both feet and inches and the abstractions of the metre, they were also consequent of a remarkable view of spacial perception itself.
L-C believed our spatial perception worked in the manner of the Fibonacci series, lots of perceptions close up, stretching to less less of them far away. he also stated this as common sense. Meanwhile, he thought, once you brought all the elements of dimension together to create the ordered but 'variomatic' (I'm borrowing this term) whole, that you would understand it as a texture (as a feeling NOT a written text). I guess that goes some way to explaining why being in/at the Unite d-habitation at Marseilles is so immersive an experience, and why the phenomenologists amongst today's young architects, so paralysed by the mysteries of 'space' might do well to read the Modulor and gain great insight from it.

Engine Trouble

This drawing and the blog that came with it got me in to trouble yesterday. One should be suspicious of both static drawings of engines, and (sometimes) the words of bloggers. Don't get me wrong, our Harley Evolution engine doesn't miss a beat (see below), I don't even have to touch wood or cross my fingers there, it a glorious piece of engineering, lovely in every way, and even a delight to polish.
However, as I stated yesterday (yikes!) in the Event Theatre, and twice to make it worse, it is still flawed.
There might be a great dissertation in the title 'The Myth of Perfect Engineering'; I won't be writing it but somebody should. Instead I shall be buying myself a little model kit of a V-twin with moving parts from Haynes (including little flashing spark plug lights) for £25 and eat humble pie; to remind myself not just of the four stroke cycle, but of the fact that both pistons in a Harley engines absolutely DO NOT spark at the same time, despite the fact that this charmingly allowed me to conclude this was why Harleys were so loud.
What a twit.
The pistons rise at the same moment but are on different parts of the cycle.
And the engine is slightly out of balance if you compare it to the 'perfect' symmetry of a horizontally opposed engine as might be found in a BMW R75 (the so called boxer type) but hell, Harley have spent spent every working day since the twenties in the design shop in Milwaukee trying to fix that inherent problem, and this does rather represent a triumph in evolutionary technology over pure rationality.
If you need proof, then, of America's 'can do' mentality as opposed to Germany's exquisite diagram look no further; demonstrated, of course, in products, maybe even 'cultural products' (?) that date from way back; think for instance of WW2 tanks (Tiger vs Sherman) or machine guns (M42 vs M2).
Now I would like to write THAT cultural history of technology, but to do so I'd better sharpen up my act.

Resurrection

So I've decided to resurrect Architecture and Other Habits Too. After taking a long break away from blogging, and furious at the weird disappearance of Architecture and Other Habits (my old blog), it looks as if there are so many issues around I can't resist. Too much to be done methinks.
In the meantime this photograph was taken by Julie as we wound our way around the Elan Valley in Wales this summer on the trike; an unforgettable day.

Photo Copyright: Julie Cook