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.