Technology site visit

Eden Project - The Core, site visit

We've looked at the early stages of growing buildings on meshes, now there is...

http://votegood.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/wow-biocouture-growing-clothing/

Photoshop development on Experimental Media

Janelle Monae

One cool chick. She just get cooler - anyone seen the headpiece architectural movie reference?? If anyone wants to get me a Christmas/Birthday/Anything present...

stories in stone

My housemate's dad is coming for dinner tonight, a prospect I am not entirely keen on, as I can't stand the guy.  He is very affected and loves the sound of his own voice (maybe we're too similar)... but he really does love the sound of his own voice.  So much so, in fact, that he has finished a long career in the police and is now a professional storyteller.

I don't know if there's much money in it, but doing that is quite interesting when you think about how it would actually work.  It recalls a time of pre-literature, sitting around the camp fire, passing down the stories of the tribe.  The Norse sagas were never written down - Beowulf only comes to us from a later record of a remembered tale.  All this got me thinking about literature and architecture, and I'd never really understood why we link the two together - as some have said, that architecture IS literature.

All architecture can be 'read' - a useful word in this instance - to some degree.  Some is easier to read than others, because the message is more definitive, more basic.  The pyramids are stories about individuals, and about their everlasting greatness.  If you saw the pyramid and was told that at its heart was the tomb of one man, you would instantly be able to 'read' that the person was powerful, that such greatness should endure forever... a blunt, but successful message. The cathedrals are stories about other-worldliness and the hope of 'another place' - more difficult to interpret, as they are more complex shapes (because the message is to be read in the space created internally, not as a singular form showing as an icon of one man) - but still a clear message.

And for thousands of years, until very recently, buildings acted exactly as literature, not just in form but covered in symbols, hierogylphs and carvings.  To reinforce the message the builders were trying to convey.  So now, with sheer white walls of modernist buildings or functional industrial, the decoration has disappeared and gives us less direct interpretation.  We may recognise a modernist building now, and the values attached, but it is all far more ambiguous if we had no prior knowledge.
From a zero start point, how would you judge whether a white cube was trying to be good or bad, humble or great?  You could analyse the construction, the modular units and distances and ascertain that the builders were trying to give an impression of uniformity and equality, but this is a far more complex conclusion than the brute simplicity of a pyramid tomb.

Pyramids are headlines, printed in bold.  RAMESES IS GOD.
New buildings are ambiguous - they should be novels with cliff hangers, anti-heroes and an R-rated certificate.

Drinking tea in the snow, looking at the view... that's my concept

Japanese Snow Garden site composition

Hybrid objects

Experimental Media 4

Experimental media 3

Experimental Media 2

Experimental Media

learning architecture

An interview with Steven Holl

http://inhabitat.com/2010/10/13/interview-exclusive-7-questions-with-architect-steven-holl/1/

Sound as... vision?

This is a video sent to me by Marc Holdereid of Bristol University, who I've been talking to about bats and how we can interpret what they 'see' from their echo-location calls.  They have a idea of their environment from the return sound of their clicks, so how does this work??  Can they see this in their 'minds eye' or... obviously they are not as visually focussed as we are.  This visualisation is based on analysis of their echo-location calls, recreating a flight path, and is not a visual recording.  Watch closely, and the environment 'fades' as the return sound of the echolocation call dissipates...

Awesome... (by the way, the bat was flying along a gap between some trees, where a fence had been put in... its pretty clear in the video when you know that)

Hans Fallada - "The Drinker"

To summarise this book, its about a middle class, middle age, middle of the road man, who turns to drink as his business and marriage start to stagnate. Through his own twisted perceptions and some of the twisted perceptions of society, his (relatively) innocent, and stupid, drinking habit becomes the basis for him being committed, for life, to an insane asylum, without possibility of release.  He loses everything, his wife, his home, business, position, and finally his own sense of himself - he becomes, as he says, a shadow.

And to add to it, this was written by a famous German author, who, before the war, had written best sellers and been feted as a success.  But this was written, in secret and in code, in the dark days of 1944, from inside a Nazi insane asylum himself.

Sounds like fun, but somehow, despite the obvious parallels with himself, he writes with amazing humour about the fall into disrepute, and the actions for which you would normally expect him to be so ashamed and try to hide, he blasts openly.  Even the point where he drunkenly tries to raid the family silverware to raise money for more alcohol, is discovered by his wife and nearly murders her (leading to his arrest and imprisonment in the asylum) appears amusing and lighthearted...

It is only when, later in the book, after he has recounted how he managed to fall from his respected position one glass of schnapps at a time, that he enters the asylum, that the tone becomes darker.  From this point you realise that the autobiographical nature of the story is getting so close to the bone that he cannot raise himself to joke about it, even in the blackest irony.  The pace and delivery change, to a more clinical, efficient description of his surroundings, the habits and lunacies of those he is locked up with and the inhuman treatment these receive.  In fact, the outside part, recording his fall, is written in a sort of warm glow - like that he describes he feels with alcohol.  You don't mind that he's tried to kill his wife when he's drunk, because its humorous, the actions don't carry any weight, any responsibility.  Its only when he sobers up in prison that the tone changes, to the cold, clear analysis of his situation.
It becomes an anguished tale of how the mental patients are forgotten and left to rot, a burden on the relatives and the state, who all wish the problem would just disappear (which the Nazi seemed to brutally solve).  But the character does not finish the story rotting as an unjustifiably locked up innocent... from his friendly beginnings you quite like him, and as he sobers up, you pity the harsh treatment, but by the very end, you realise he is not all there, that is 'incurable'... its just what has made him that way that should be changed.

http://www.aggregat456.com/2010/10/wes-anderson-vs-jacques-tati.html

trading up, a freecycle building

I'm a member of freecycle, the Yahoo hosted exchange and recycling system, where people get rid of their old junk (another man's gold), by posting an "offered" message on a big group email that is sent to all the users.  Offered, coffee pot, SW2... that sort of thing.

Similarly, you can request things... Wanted, coffee pot, SW2... you get the idea.  When you see something you want, or something someone needs, which you want to get rid of, you just email them and its done.  Its put me in mind of that guy in Seattle who traded a red paper clip up to a house... his version of the "bigger, better" game.

Would it be interesting to see if we could do something similar in architecture?  Could we build an entire house, and equip it from stuff that is other people's junk?  Extraneous hoovers, bits of drainpipe... I'm not talking about a house made of rubbish, but a properly constructed one.  The items offered are often high quality and perfectly working - with the consumerist culture of "upgrading", anything 2nd hand is almost always deemed to be worthless now, apart from houses, where age is seen as a benefit, which is almost unique.  A new house, that is already 2nd hand... hmmmm... think that could go down an interesting path...

Alternative ways of looking at sound

Its from an advertising point of view, but some of the ideas are quite interesting... lookup

LYe76-Kam Fan Award

on youtube

weird stuff

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me5Zzm2TXh4

An Ancient Comedy of Urban Errors...

re-posting is cheating, but this was particularly good I thought

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/ancient-comedy-of-urban-errors.html

The Baader Meinhof Complex - Stefan Aust

This is briiiilliant.  Firstly because the Baader-Meinhof group was a name I'd heard, but didn't really know anything about (so it filled in a lot of gaps I didn't know I had in my head), but secondly, and more importantly, there's such a huge, barely concealed tension in the book.

It's an attempt at an objective history of this gang of pretty well intentioned, moralistic students who were part of the worldwide student protests in outrage at the US war in Vietnam, the nuclear arms race, and growing tensions between east and west.  From West Germany, protesting in the late 60's student movements, they developed through the 70's into a proper terrorist organisation, one step following another, from protesting at a student demo, to the final act, the hijacking of an airliner alongside a Palestinian terrorist organisation.  As they say, "from protest, to resistance

But Aust doesn't manage to be entirely objective - this is his passion, he seethes with angst over the events, because - as is revealed at the start of the book - he very nearly fell into the gang.  Events transpired that he left them early, before things really took off, but there is a definite sense of "there but for the Grace of God, go I..."

Its an amazing story, especially reading it now in the anti-septic surroundings of South Bank university in the early 21st century.  These were students who wanted to change the world, and felt (quite correctly as it turned out) that they really could.  It didn't go as they'd hoped, but their impact was enormous.  The context in which it all happened was staggering in its difference to today... the university they were at, on the entrance to the main building, was draped with a 20ft high banner, in massive red letters saying "revolution or death!" or something... people fought with the police on the streets, human rights were worth taking a beating for.  What would get people on to the streets now?  Its hard not to agree with a certain amount of what these people said and did - a lot of it was total crap, and they became entirely corrupted by the struggle they found themselves in (threatening to blow up an airliner full of innocent tourists is NOT something to emulate), but as Aust puts it, they had a certain style, its like reading the script of Hollywood movie (which in fact, it now is...)

The self confidence, the drive, the seemingly inescapable logic of protest to resistance to retaliation and to offensive that they employed, was incredible.  Read it, in a bit of a dry way (from his attempt at a clinical analysis of events) at points, its brilliant.

Book worm

This is probably going to sound terrible, because I don't really know the format these are supposed to take, but I'm going to try and review the books I read (a bit).  The writing of the blog helps me figure out what I'm thinking, so I'm hoping that reviewing the books will help me understand them, to get an overall view on what they're trying to say - otherwise I have a habit of getting the ideas they hold for the duration of read, and then they slip away.

Mixed use?!

This is awesome - derelict houseboat, tied up for years, gradually falling into disrepair, so the owners gradually spread to an old camper van, adding to it as they gradually move in... finally, this starts to succumb to the weather, time, moisture, use... and they expand more, connecting to the boatshed and industrial containers behind... amazing way to live, like a grotty, decomposing time line.

oh yes, and a guest appearance from my mum and my dog (having a crap...)

Goonhilly

Goonhilly

Goonhilly Earth Station

Goonhilly high plateau near the Lizard in Cornwall. Slightly offset to the right of centre is the Earth Station, currently a defunct BT communications base, falling into disrepair. Originally the base was one of the linked radar network sites during the Second World War, then it became related to satellite telecomms in the Cold War and finally civilian telecomms with BT... it was the largest satellite uplink in the world, received the pictures of the Moon landings from the Apollo spaceship.

Architecture of Death. Part II

There's this veil of mysticism about death, it scares the crap out of people and we try not toreally think about it. So we have our various beliefs and stories about it, and they distance it from our real day to day lives. But there is this big industry, factory process to deal with it, and there are a lot of people who do deal with it everyday. Its probably a bit of a brutal analogy, but its a bit like people who work in the food industry - you just want to have your chicken or steak turn up sealed in a little plastic tray in the supermarket, you don't really want to have to think about the bolt-gun-between-the-eyes/rolling-onto-wet-concrete-floor/slashed-throat-open/blood-drained/gutted/fire-blazed/skinned/sawn/chopped-up horror that got it there, all nice and sanitary in its uniform plastic tray - but for a lot of people its just a job, working in a factory, which is what most abattoirs are.

The crematorium is probably about as popular as having an open cast mine or a paedophile safehouse-treatment centre located in your neighbourhood. But they are, by their nature, sympathetic to the local vernacular, designed to look at least, gentle, non-offensive and calm. No one tried to create a Po-Mo crematorium aesthetic experiment. The brief is strictly conformist to limit the distress to the mourners.

Form follows function to a certain extent, and the design has to incorporate a large plant room, where the cremator and associated equipment and machinery are housed. This needs to be large and give access to the fairly complicated equipment, so its often large, airy and warehouse like, with, necessarily, a concrete floor. The public do NOT go into this room. This room would definitely remove the veil of mystery.

Aside from various adjacent office/storage/reception rooms, the building is axial, with a catafalque outside the cremator room, and a larger, main space beyond that, in which the service is held. This room, beyond the initial entrance hall way is basically, as far as the mourners go. The building is axial for the processional purpose of the coffin, entering through the aisle, between seated mourners, into the catafalque and on, through the closed doors into the beyond, the next life, or whatever you choose to believe (but actually, into the big warehouse room at the end unfortunately).

It is a secular building, without fixed religious ornament - the company has a business to run, so it can't exclude a 'market' by fixing itself to just one religious denomination. So the ephemeral, transcendental aesthetic experience is difficult to achieve without making it look too much like a church. But high pitched ceilings recall cathedrals, in a slight way (and conveniently follow the roof pitch line from the warehouse-cremator room at the back). A single pitched roof line may make a large building look a bit too much like a shed, so it is not too much difficult to slightly raise the pitch over the vestry, but the essential line is one long contiguous roof pitch. This is cheap and effect and has been used on countless industrial buildings, and is very effective for space and cost.

Filtered sun light from high windows sends shafts of light through the vestry, on to the seated congregation.

Clad in local stone and decorated internally with a homogeneous off-white stucco, a slate roof maybe, it masks the simple concrete block-work construction and steel i-beams of modern building, which would de-mystify the event and bring the harsh reality to the grieving mourners eyes.

Finally, the plan of the site, the landscaping. This is one of the most important bits of the whole experience, and key to the company's strategy of 'brand loyalty'. They do, effectively, want you to come back.

People have arrived in the carpark, disembarked and made there way in small groups along paths to the front of the building, a portico with a separate road arriving at it, along which the hearse arrives, and disgorges the coffin, under the cover of the overhanging portico.

Unfortunately, this arrangement, from an architectural point of view, with a carpark supporting a main building, and an additional circular access road for dropping off the body, is almost identical to how a MacDonald's Drive-Thru works, with a few more trees and bushes scattered around. And it is necessary, it is efficient. Hopefully, the hearses won't arrive too fast though, or you will have a traffic jam.

The congregation sit, and often the coffin is carried up the aisle (or wheeled), and sits on a plinth at the far end of the vestry - it will go through into the catafalque, then they close the doors to the vestry, to hide the view when they open the doors to the cremator room.

When you go through the service and the coffin is in front of you, and the taboo of death is being confronted by the congregation, everyone is sad and uncomfortable, and obviously feels awful. This is not a good feeling to have - from a commercial point of view at least, and they certainly would not want you to just leave on that note. But when the coffin is removed and the service finishes, everyone filters out into a 'Garden of Contemplation' (not Prayer, obviously). This is a release from the strictures of the service. Fresh air, a beautiful garden, possibly a small pondy/lake thing, probably some flowing water somewhere, and a good view (plenty of open sky) and a chance to stretch the legs. This emphasises the fact that what is done is done, you are back in the real world and life goes on, and the whoever you have left hopefully had a good life - also, it is not YOU who has just been left inside the building behind.

Conveniently, the Exit signs are located in the direction of the congregation's general drift, like when you leave a ride at a theme park, just as the next batch are getting out of their cars and drifting, in small huddled groups, to the signs for Entrance...

Architecture of Death. Part I

Ok, I might be slightly glamourizing the title, a bit... what I'm actually talking about, is the process of what happens when you die..

where do you go?

Sorry, I can't help the melodrama. I don't mean, "do you go up to a big bright light in the sky", I mean, where does the hunk of meat that used to be you... go? The second half of this summer has been a strange one, and while I haven't been to any funerals, I've spent more time in hospitals, elderly care homes and so on, than I have ever done before and it's put the whole idea of getting old, going a bit mad, and finally passing on at the front of my brain.

Death is surrounded by such mysticism, such taboo, that we very rarely talk about it - I even felt a bit sacriligeous, a bit offensive saying that you get old, go mad, and then you die... Seeing my old Gran in the 'home'/waiting room, its an unspoken thought that goes around all heads in the family. What happens when... what do we do about...

So in our minds we have a huge mental block, a stigma of death - completely understandably. But there are a lot of us around... and so a lot of death going on, a lot of the time. The biggest of individual events has no special significance to the civil authorities, regardless of how much respect and sympathy they are ordered to have. They have a job to do. When you die, a process starts.

Say the average life expectancy is 75 years. Thats 900 months. 27375 days! Does that sound a little or a lot to you? You might get a few more years than that, hopefully you won't get less. But (and this maths has some holes in it I know, but I can't be bothered to research the death rate) if we've got a population of 58million, then your 'last day' is going to happen to over 2000 people per day. That's a lot of meat. 154 tonnes of dead humans A DAY to be brutal, in the UK alone.

You can't be kept around too long, or you'll start to smell, and they have a rule book about Health and Safety, and preventing diseases. So you have to be disposed of fairly soon. Its a Harsh Reality.

When you look at the figures you realise how big a physical job this all is... burial, cremation etc etc. And you start to realise that it MUST be a horribly organised, factory-like process. The individual story of each person disappears into the production line. Health and Safety rules apply - rather than being carried by 6 sombre pall bearers, you're wheeled on a stainless steel trolley. Trolley? Can't be any steps then, and one of your mourners might be in a wheelchair, so you glide along on automated ball bearings.

You're being cremated... most people are. You have to be a pretty committed religious addict these days to be buried. And so, you are outsourced to the local crematorium, owned by Death Corp, a multi-armed multi national, more likely to be called Memoria Inc, or Elysium Ltd... They own 200 hundred crematoria across the country, and have a bulk gas contract with Shell's LPG department to maximise profits. They're hedged against future price rises from North Sea gas to lock in future profits...

And environmental rules and targets apply to everyone, especially civil buildings. So in crematoria now, they have HEAT RECLAMATION... I will not explain, but wonder where the warm glow from the underfloor heating is coming from during the service? (This, unsurprisingly, doesn't happen in Germany...) Teaching them how to be efficient for once, but that might be pricking their collective memory a little too far. It keeps costs down, you only need one heating system and ticks lot of green boxes when you go into planning...

Then there is the form of the building itself.

breadth of view

I have to start reading other blogs than Paul's. Every days little inserted segment of his life either brings me up or down - and lets face it, he writes 'down' pretty well. Its not like it affects my entire day, but the need for a counterbalance is definitely ... there.

Real Architectik

So the 1st Year is a long distant memory now. The happy-go-lucky experimentation of projects like "a timeline" and "make something out of some other crap" are far in the past. Standing up for crits with a couple of crumpled A3 sketches isn't going to cut it anymore.

I've been sitting in an architects office in Truro for a few weeks - ostensibly on "work experience". This is an architecture firm which DOES stuff - a lot of projects - but is about as far removed from the theoretical student experience as it is possible to be. The work they do largely revolves around renovating and working around existing old Cornish stone and slate buildings, in areas of dubious urban "conservation" or outstanding natural beauty (ie, they are hemmed in left right and centre by the all powerful triumvirate of planning, conservation and English Heritage offices). If it is a new build it will almost invariably have a slate roof... everything is IN KEEPING. It has to be - to get paid, you have to get it approved and that means, not breaking the mould.

Work days revolve around sitting in a hot office, staring at a computer. I've done that before. But that time, it would often be broken up by a £500 lunch at Amaya and a bottle of wine - this happy and rare occurence does not happen a lot in a business park in Truro.

What I'm trying to say, is that the lure of university is growing - academia doesn't suffer the cruel realities of planning offices and conservation groups - and there are no bills to pay. Makes me wonder if the whole endeavour for me was about escaping the corporate world...

Don't miss... in the next installment... our feature presentation...

THE ARCHITECTURE OF DEATH

Etienne de Crecy

Its an old video, and I'm not saying you have to like the music, (which I think is just electro-squelchy enough for me on the right occasion), but this has to be one of the best dj'ing music shows I have ever seen. The booth is literally inside the projection cubes, he is mixing from inside and the projectors are synced to the beats - apart from an awesome visual effect, there's a lot going on here... an amazing space in there - and out there for what it creates to the crowd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzil8S7tUeY

Summer so far

Its been a pretty crazy summer so far, sounds like it has been for everyone, not just me. I've just been in to South Bank to do some pointless form filling, but also to collect my portfolio and my journal and essay. Wandering around the (very quiet) university buildings and then reading the journal again on the bus on the way home, I'm really looking for term to start again - last year was a real eye opener, getting my head around the idea of studying again, and - more importantly - the fact that you're on your own with it - you get out of it, what you put in. The lecturer's will point you in the right direction and then you're on your own to make of it what you will.

But I've also been speaking to some 'proper' architects a lot recently... ie. practicing ones... and the same message keeps coming through - experience is absolutely vital. Get working for a company and get on with it NOW...

an additional blog... if you are interested

a daily tune, (or when I remember to do it...) for your listening pleasure.

http://yourdailyearworm.blogspot.com/

Planning process explained

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/02/23/town-planners-playing-scrabble-using-google-earth-291/

internet becoming like the M40

i was just thinking that it was like that, or at least motorways in general... you get on it, with an idea of going somewhere, and you can only get off at the big junctions - you miss out on all the stuff inbetween, the stuff that it has been planned that you don't see... possibly, the GOOD stuff. But you do get there fast, probably where you wanted to go. That's what google does - who actually clicks on anything that isn't on the first page? It means you are channelled into a series of decisions - it doesn't increase your freedom, it decreases it. The car and the internet are only expressions of freedom if you actually take that dodgy little back road, or flick to page 84 of the search results... otherwise, you are just going backwards and forwards between Reading and Birmingham.

Back to reality! #2

ok, ok, after the last week I could do with some back to reality in any kind of sense. I'm begging for it now. A cup of tea and a slice of toast around 8am and then off to work on the tube... anything with some normality to it, I've had an overload of ... non reality. The unsustainable stuff you could also call "holiday".

So I was back in London from Canada for 36 hours - always a disconcerting experience facing that much unopened post - and I had a LOT to do. But then off again to Benicassim for the music festival, which I'd missed the start of. Missed the Santiago Calatrava stuff in Valencia in my rush to catch up with the debauchery going on at the festival, safe in the knowledge that I'd have a few days in Barca after to get some 'culture'.

It was a mess, a big, beautiful mess. The whole weekend was a writhing mass of gorgeous, honey coloured people, jumping around in the setting sun and then the steamy night to Leftfield, Boyz Noize, Daedalus, Dizzee Rascal, huge mdma grins on their faces, safe in the knowledge that next day would be spent stretched on the beach to recover.

And then it was over. Everyone left, and I had to go to Barcelona. Only I didn't. I had a cheap good room in the hotel, the food was good and it was a long trip on a hot day. So my friends jumped in taxis, trains, and staggered home, and I stayed... and read Crash by Ballard on a comedown. Very very strange. Barely spoke to anyone for 2 days as 'suicide tuesday' came and went and felt I was being sucked into the book, the feeling you get when you wake up from an intense dream and are not sure if its been real or not. A dream hangover. It started to feel that way about the weekend - I remembered it, but had no connections to it, unless I wandered up to the deserted site to prove to myself that this was where it had all been going on.

And now, after 15 hours of travel home, 2 trains, a metro, a bus and air traffic delays, home. Breakfast... and on the road again, to sit with my mum waiting for my dad to come out of heart surgery in hospital 300 miles away in Cornwall.

Tea and toast, with marmalade please.

Back to reality!

Well that's what everyone keeps telling me... and its probably fair enough - unpaid volunteer work out in the Canadian boonies isn't going to keep me going forever, but its really depressing that so many of my friends (mostly the English ones, with jobs and houses) feel like this is the only 'reality' available. "You can head off somewhere for a bit, but its not a proper way to do things, long term, I mean, what about your pension arrangements..." Ok, no one actually said THAT, but you get the idea. They revelled in my misery at being back on the tube. "Ahhh, you thought you could escape..."

I know I'm often the same about things - those fundamental ideas of who you are and what you do, often coming down to only being able to live in a certain place doing a fairly limited range of certain jobs - but its crap when you have a look outside that invisible box you make for yourself, it makes you realise how it can trap you. Keeping objective, thats the thing isn't it? Nietzsche and all that malarky...

time running down to change

well, i've got a couple of days left in Canada, and its sweltering under the fierce sun. Work has stopped and scattered people are sheltering in the shade, along with the deer flies. Its been an amazing month, the language maybe the same, but it has been a totally culture shock... probably the most dramatic change in way of life I've ever experienced. City to wilderness... or maybe not wilderness, but surrounded by it, and feeling like humans are the interlopers here, being squeezed out steadily but surely by the forest, rather than the other way round. The people here are clinging on to the last bits of a way of life that has almost disappeared forever.
I've got this queasy feeling that everything I've learnt will evaporate though when I get home, back to the usual urban surrounds, and I don't want that to happen. The self-sufficiency - and Efficiency - of how life goes on here, from raw necessity is a feeling I want to try and hold on to, and maintain. Living off the land... thats the North American way, an unending resource - not a very popular sentiment in terms of city size consumption, but with small groups, a few here, a few there, it certainly seems to work. And in a place like this, its a sumptuous lifestyle of provision that you can take from nature... if you can hold on long enough.

Canada

Not really sure where or what to start about this Canada trip, but sitting on edge of the forest, with not a lot around, and reading Paul Shepheard's "The Cultivated Wilderness" in a hammock in the evenings has been awesome.

Vancouver Island is definitely NOT like the rolling English countryside

... as they claim. There's bears for one, which I don't see a lot of in Kent. You might have the occasional badger, but an irate grizzly (they're always irate apparently) would definitely be out of place in Westerham.

And everything looks too LOW. I've spent too much time in London, I realise that, but I thought we were still in some out-of-town shopping centre suburb when the bus pulled into the throbbing, beating heart of Downtown Victoria. Talk about a high degree of fake, as Ellie puts it. Clapboard over concrete seems to be the standard building type here. But the other thing is the proportion seems all wrong. Because everything has enough space here, too much in fact, and buildings aren't piled on top of one another, they haven't been forced UP enough. Everything's on its own plot, 40 yards back from the road, disconnected to anything else around it. But they love big, so they go out side ways and back... but not up. So all the buildings are long smudges, and you get the feeling everythign is too... squat.

The Cousins

I haven't seen them for years and there was a good reason.

They were on holiday up the road for a week so dropped by to have lunch and catch up, since the last time we'd seen each other was Grandad's funeral ten years ago. We filled the initial silences with questions about their obscure north - midland's town and how they'd been 'getting on'. And how was Auntie ... ? Where IS the north midlands?? Its not on my mental map. Its like that terra incognita I keep banging on about, but instead of a dragon ready to pull down the venturing ships, or a cherubic face blowing the Westerly's across the ocean, it is a (Lacoste) crocodile (logo) or a Kawasaki ZX-10 exhaust sputtering fumes, cartoon style.

My family is spread wide across England's green and pleasant land. You find us in a range of places. Some would be at gymkhanas in June, riding Bobbet to 3rd prize and a rosette. Other's would be in golf club committee meetings, mulling over the latest outrages by the newly admitted ladies to the saloon bar. Some wear wigs and gowns, and have memberships at the golf courses, but only for the once or twice they can be bothered to play. More would be found marketing, advertising, designing, drinking, dining and getting on, getting... somewhere. Never sure if its 'on' in all its furore, all the thrashing probably means we're standing still. But its in London and all that matters, because to be anywhere else is to be on the periphery, to be a side show. A yokel.

And these particular visiting cousins are found in out of town shopping centres at the weekend, working in factory outlet stores by A46s from 7 every morning, village pubs (now that they do classy red onion and goat's cheese tarts), and now... here. In our living room.

I'd been to see my 93 year old granny earlier that day. She's in a home and hard of hearing now, she's not at all 'with it'. And later, in the living room, the glazed looks were the same as hers as I vivaciously chatted and quipped about my planned summer of trips and diversions, learning through fun and experience, travel and adventure. Anything not to fall into an awkward silence.

And, to my horror, I realise that its not because these hicks, these uneducated slick-backs are stupid that they glaze over, its because I AM BORING them. To tears. Probably like my grandmother, stuck in her room with only me shouting at her to count as company. (She probably wished I'd sod off and let her get on with watching the tennis...)

It's not, maybe, that I am that boring. I hope. Its just that we totally outside each other's frames of reference. When I laughed with my mum after they left about their only available adjectives for what they felt, as things being "nice" - whether it be a sandwich or their daughter's engagement - we marvelled at their lack of self perception. How could you live like that?? But they were looking straight back at me thinking... when will this twat get a proper job and stop fucking around doing cut and paste at poncey university. He's 29, he's at university, and he's not even got a girlfriend. He's probably gay, stupid and lazy. Ha ha...

From Bauhaus to Our House

Tom Wolfe agrees with me... woohoo! I just read his book, and although he wrote it 20 years before I did my journal, I am going to claim that I made my point first... He basically thinks Michael Graves is a twat as far as I can work out, and that Po-Mo is a load of self-congratulatory in-house jokes between up-their-own-arse architects... pretty much what I plonked into my journal. Just have to convince Ellie now I didn't plagiarise it...

Landscape seems to sit ON the architecture in Cornwall, not the other way round

The moss at the bottom is actually just covering a dry stone wall, but the tree growing from the top of it must be 150 years old at least. It roots have strengthened rather than weakened the structure.

The steps worn into the path are actually tree roots, exposed as the loam has been eroded by the passing feet.

Transit of Venus

I think it was the transit of Venus that sent Captain Cook off round the world, at the orders of the Royal Geographic Society - ending up in Tahiti after several years travelling, discovering Australia on the way. I just lent out of a bedroom window at 11pm last night... doesn't quite seem so dramatic does it?

Terra Incognita

I just went to see the Map exhibition at the British Library, a look at how maps have been influenced by, and have influenced themselves art, politics, and the way we look at space (or so says all the blurb).

A bit like studying architecture, everything was western-centric... I think there was only one Chinese map, painted on silk as a perspective - it looked like a piste map from a ski resort. There were a few birds-eye view maps, done in incredible detail, of medieval guild towns, but they end up looking a bit like a cartoon, a Where's-Wally of intricate detail. Almost all the others were of top-down 2-dimensional plan views, a fairly static way of looking at the world since the 1300's Mappa Mundi. Some of them were drawn "upside down" as South used to be the primary direction indicated by compasses, an inversion which gives you a different perspective on the world but is pretty superficial.

And I'm flying to Canada on Tuesday week... into Vancouver and then working my way north from Victoria into the maze of islands in the straits between the Vancouver Island and the mainland. East Thurlow Island doesn't appear on any of the maps in the Exhibition today, and neither does Canada in almost any of them. They appear as 'Terra Incognita', there be dragons, and who knows what's out there?

British Museum Renaissance Drawings exhibition

A sketch by the young Da Vinci looking down on his home town from the hills above Urbino in the middle of summer.

Back from Stockholm

All the stereotypes are true about that place. Yes, it will cost you £6 for a pint of beer and YES you will trip over your own tongue as the girls walk passed in the sun.

105 done in.. the blink of an eye! (boom boom)

What's left?

Hmmm... 105, basically everything. A quick model of 104 and 1 section, and that, is THE LOT. The end is in sight, I hope they're chilling the beer for me in the Duke...

Final Countdown.

In 96 hours time I will have handed my portfolio in and be in the pub. Yum. Before then however, I will have to complete the last 14 final pages of my 84 page portfolio (yes, I am still wasting time "planning" my work). That includes all of P105 unfortunately, which is going to end up looking like an ugly blot of shitness on something which in general I'm quite proud of. P105 is my fly in the ointment.

Tick tock, back to it.

History Journal #7 - Post-Modernism

History Journal #6 - High Modernism, Modernity and other 'isms'

History Journal #5 - Futurism, Early Modernism and Technology

History Journal #4 - The Industrial Revolution