Happy New Year. By all accounts, 2014 will be an important one, so I'd like to mention a few of the issues which will hopefully emerge in the next few months. First off is our architectural identity, which is inextricably tied up with the definition of nationality, and that of course is up for debate.
Nationality means little once you realise that folk are the same the world over. Welsh, Scots, English, Irish – we’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns. By contrast, places are distinct, as are the buildings which emerge from them. Architecture is influenced by local materials, climate, tradition and so on, and we should celebrate the variety that creates.
Perhaps the greatest challenge is to convince ourselves: witness Carol Craig’s recent book, The Scots’ Crisis of Confidence. Some architects feel uneasy about overt Scottishness, perhaps scared to appear parochial, yet previous generations including Mackintosh, Lorimer and Hurd suffered no such hang-ups. Do the detractors fear an outbreak of crowsteps? No danger – because as Richard Murphy said, Scottish architecture is not about a national style.
Instead, it’s an approach. The “stern exterior with a sensual interior” which Carl MacDougall identified in Painting the Forth Bridge, is typically Scots. Likewise, the courtyard form, the re-entrant angle, deep-revealed windows in massive walls, and pitched roofs with skew parapets evolved in response to particular conditions. Individually, few of these are unique to Scotland, but in combination they became characteristic.
The notion of Scottishness applies on a city-wide scale, too: our tenement blocks constructed from stone are quite different to the brick-built terraces typically found south of the border. The pattern of riggs and closes in our medieval towns, and the great set-piece of the New Town, aren’t replicated elsewhere, but are distinctly Scots solutions to the universal brief of laying out cities. Some even date back to the days before 1707…
In fact, there’s solid proof that independence will spur on a distinctive architecture. When the National Movement emerged in the 1920’s, it formed part of a broader Scottish Renaissance. The Saltire Society was created soon after, then Reiach & Hurd wrote Building Scotland, a manifesto for a native Scots modernism. From that grew Robert Matthew’s work in the late 1950’s, including Dundee and Edinburgh universities, and the hydro stations in the Breadalbane range.
Just as importantly, that generation of Scots architects also took a philosophical position. They published articles, put forward manifestos, and defended their work in public debate. Today’s independence campaign could catalyse something similar, and perhaps find a resonance with Robert Matthew’s declaration that the architect’s task is “to lay the foundations not only of a new architecture, but of a new society”.
Independence could be good for the construction industry, too. Already, devolution has enabled work to begin on the new Forth Bridge, the Alloa and Waverley rail lines, and reconstruction of the A9. The rural housing crisis needs a solution, and an independent Scotland will need venues for its new institutions. Building all those could provide a decade’s work.
To rationalise: my conviction is that Scotland can prosper without the Union. After all, why wouldn’t the country which produced so many inventors, gave birth to the Adam brothers, Mackintosh and Geddes, and has copious natural resources, succeed on its own account? Next, I hope to explore this train of thought in more detail, with not a "Cassandra" in sight.
It’s December in Illinois. Fat snowflakes fall from the sky. There is a queue of SUV’s snaking along the interstate, waiting their turn to nose into the Engine Sheriff’s garage for a set of winter tyres. Mr Wolf isn’t particularly warm, because the architect who designed this particular building was in thrall to Mies van der Rohe.
As a result, three walls are fully glazed, floor to ceiling, with 1960’s double glazing units. The glass is uncoated, although it has a grey solar film on the inside. A draught whistles in around the profiles, the seals around the units have shrunk, and there are gaps between the frame and the soffit which should have been siliconed.
A zipped-up metal roof sits above the suspended ceiling, with only a meagre amount of Timber Roll to provide insulation. The heating consists of a hot air blower, which struggles to warm the air around it, far less put heat into the fabric of a building which has negligible thermal mass. Mr Wolf is grateful for his fur collar, but he recalls once more that the glass box wasn’t conceived for northerly latitudes.
Mr Wolf flew into O’Hare yesterday to meet the Shale Barons. He convinced them that a giant Scottish box fabricated from crinkly Rigidal was exactly what they needed. They found his accent quaint, but sat up when he showed them his teeth. The meeting was a success. Moses, Senior VP of Production, took him to a fancy restaurant on Lake Shore Drive afterwards. Despite his fur collar, Mr Wolf felt the biting wind coming off Lake Michigan when he left the cab and crossed the sidewalk.
When Mr Wolf was younger, he heard all about the John Hancock centre and Sears Tower from his father, who was out here in the 1960’s trying to sell Scottish machine tools to the Yankees. These are the ingenious devices that, in war or peace, automatically drill the bores in rifles, stamp the fenders for Cadillacs, and cut the turbine blades for jet engines. They range from small machines, such as workshop lathes that sell for a few hundred dollars, to giant complexities that automatically cut and shape a section of an aircraft’s wing.
Back then, Scotland sold as many of its own brainchildren as it imported other peoples’. Wolf senior was on an equal footing with the industrialists he sold machines to – they recognised that original ideas would always be in demand. You can afford to be magnanimous, even a little humble, when folk beat a path to your door. He wasn’t here looking for business: it had come looking for him.
A decade ago, by contrast, his offspring’s attitude was a curious mixture of sentimentality and hubris. The former he felt for the place where he was educated, a school of architecture named after The World’s Most Famous Scotsman. That was the making of him, he had decided. The latter stemmed from where he was going. He was convinced he would lead a world-famous practice within ten years’ time, “or I’ll eat my Calvins.” Eyebrows were raised in amused scepticism, but his fan club on the internet cheered him on. 
Nine years have passed since he boasted that prediction; he no longer believes he is on a Mission from God. He has almost convinced himself that he can make architecture from anything, by transmuting base materials like Kingspan and Alucobond. Others were less than convinced. Nonetheless, the junior wolf had always fancied seeing the windy city for himself. Now here he was, standing in The Loop with an hour to kill before dusk, when he would return to his hotel.
He’s surrounded by structural glazing and curtain walling – not far from Alcoa’s and Pittsburgh Corning’s factories which helped to develop this stuff in the first place. Yet something has changed. This isn’t the “New World” any longer, not the place which Bellow and Updike wrote about in their youth – it was the place Bellow wrote about in his dotage, of failed marriages and academic sinecures. Tin sheds and glass boxes were a vision of the future from the 1960’s. The companies his old man sold machine tools to, were sold in turn to the Chinese and Koreans years ago. It was all about salesmanship.
Mr Wolf realised that he had sold the Americans their own game: a refraction of what they already knew. But why was he still sold on the idea of High Modernism, that canon of failed experiments which looked like a million bucks, but were poorly resolved? Things fell off them. They cost a fortune to heat. Their leaky roofs kept Shanghai bucket manufacturers in business. His father’s “future” couldn’t be his. The world had changed.
He had a lot on his mind as he gained the hotel foyer, nodded to the bellhop and took an elevator upstairs.
As Mr Wolf drifted off to sleep, the lucid part of his brain recalled re-runs of American cartoons from the 1960’s. There was a cat called Mr Jinx who had two friend-enemies in the mice, Pixie and Dixie. The cat had an ambivalent attitude to those two mice: he hated them, yet he was defined by them. Their relationship was a good example of symbiosis – just like the critique of Mies van der Rohe’s aesthetic inevitably leads to discussion of detailing failures.
“There are giant glass pavillions in Chicago,” said one mouse, “which rocked the world.”
–”What’s aa this nonsense?” asked the cat, who across fifty years and a broad ocean had developed a Dundonian accent. Mysteries of life.
“They have subtle detailing that makes you think that the structure is less material than it actually is.”
–”Pish! Not so,” replied the cat, “That trickery with planted-on steel beams is a cheat. The lack of materiality is all lies. It’s lies, I tell you – lies!”
“Mies was the grandmaster of infinite space and light,” crowed the other mouse.
–”Haivers,” replied the irritated cat, “Crown Hall was badly-detailed, the roof leaked, the walls were riddled with cold bridges, it used energy like naebody’s business. Who in their right mind would build a glass box in a cold climate?”
“But glass pavilions are abstractions of pure form…” said the first mouse.
–”Come aff it, why would ye ever put a flat roof on a building somewhere that gets both heavy rain and deep snow?”
“But you forget his enormous influence on other architects,” said the other mouse.
–”Architects? More like degenerate copyists,” sniffed the cat. “The Miesians are vermin, just like you. That’s why I hate those Miesians to pieces.” What was that, Mr Jinx?
“I hate those Miesians to pieces,” growled Mr Wolf in his sleep.
Merry Christmas, Mr Wolf. Sleep tight. You might just experience an epiphany on Boxing Day…
"Fit like the day, then?"
-Not bad, I replied, -How's it going here?
"Ach, I’m nae getting on worth a docken. The site agent shook his head. "I'm near certain these drains are chokit up.
We went out into the road, he picked up a crow bar and heaved – but the iron lid didn’t shift.
"Need tae gie it a great yark wi the pinch…
With a big effort, he rived up the manhole cover: the rich smell of fermenting malt hit us immediately.
"At's nae surprise, is it? and he nodded to the pagodas of the distillery malt house behind us. It was gloamin, and their distinctive forms were silhouetted against a pale violet sky.
"We'll need tae pressure jet aa that – he nodded at the open manhole – an the chambers are collapsin, tae. The drenns are connached. You anes'll need tae gies anither Instruction, eh?
As he watched for my reaction, the site agent offered a smile for the first time that day and I began to understand where the expression "pouring money down the drain" originated…
The Song of the Drains is something we take for granted. Rather like the keen hissing of the nerves, and the low note of our pulse, it's a sound which is with us all the time, yet we have to listen carefully in order to hear it. It has deep roots: the song began over 150 years ago. The Victorians were obsessed with sanitation – you could say they were anally-retentive about it – and they were the first to hear this song.
Mucky water sluiced through iron and fireclay conduits at the start of Victoria's reign, and some of our present day infra-structure dates back to then, too. Every building built before the 1950’s has a buried network of fireclay drains under and around it, socketed and spigotted together and all shiny with a rich chestnut-brown salt glaze. There are complex manifolds whose tails fan out to gather in the branches, each laid gently on a bed of pea gravel, carefully back-filled with selected granular material – a work of artistry and loving care that no-one ever sees.
Just like every other component of a building, this is a world apart, with its own vocabulary, conventions, and hundreds of pages of B.S. to guide you. B.S., in this case, being "British Standard" rather than the cow shit which flows down gullies in cattle courts. Water sinks down into the fireclay system with a gurgle, then runs near-silently, with just a faint sussuration each time it flows through a trap. Alongside the drains, you have the steady hum of electricity cables, the evil hiss of gas mains, and the enigmatic silence of fibre optics. The only clue to the existence of this Underworld are the iron covers with cryptic messages cast into their lids.
The fireclay industry began to decline in the Fifties as drainage pipes became plastic, roof tiles were cast in concrete, and stainless steel flues were introduced. When the closely-related refractory industry crashed in the 1970’s, it took with it many of the remaining architectural fireclay manufacturers. Until then, Scotland led the world. Companies thrived in the coalfields of Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Fife for one hundred and fifty years: since the coal measures harnessed to fire the kilns are often underlain by seams of fireclay, there was a happy synergy between raw material and the means of its transformation.
The mantle passed successively from the Garnkirk Fireclay Co. to J&M Craig of Kilmarnock, and finally the Glenboig Union Fireclay Co., which was the world’s largest fireclay producer for many decades. From sinks and baths and lavvies made by Shanks of Barrhead, the fireclay pipes run under the building, through the scarcements of the external wall. Often, they’re trapped under great drifts of rubble and sour earth.
Once they escape from those confines, the pipes meet up with other effluents from tanks and rectifiers and gullies, then make their way gently downhill – the pipes grow in diameter, gathering momentum until they reach the Disconnecting Manhole. At that point, Private drainage (and if ever you wanted to keep something to yourself, it’s this), becomes Public drainage.
Drains represent the inner world, and in contrast to the outer concerns that architecture usually has, great sums are spent in order to keep it out of sight. Designing a building with its gizzards on display would be no different from leaving the lavvy with an Andrex tail hanging from one's strides. Authenticity of appearance and truth to materials never stretched this far. There are so many things to hide: like the Buchan Trap, for instance.
This ill-natured switchback, designed to prevent bad air venting through the system, is also an impediment to good drainage. The Buchan Trap is the cause of so many blockages that the "Hot Rod" companies suspect it first when the water backs up. In the old days, the Victorians flushed through the system regularly … we don't, so the Buchan Trap chokes up. Mr Buchan's name has been taken in vain many times. In fact, you could say that his name is dirt.
The Buchan Trap lives underground with other things bearing wonderfully evocative names, like the “Ames Crosta Gully Pot”. I knew nothing about that until I happened to visit the Clay Cross foundry in Derbyshire. Just like the nearby Stanton and Staveley, Clay Cross was the descendant of an ancient iron founding company which latterly made castings for hydraulic engineering, from simple drain covers to complex valves. In the usual manner of these things, the Ames Crosta company had been successively swallowed up by larger and larger rivals like Babcock until the pike at the head of the water treatment foodchain, Biwater, bought it.
While the initial lure of Clay Cross was the rumour of several old XJS Jaguars lying abandoned inside, I discovered huge fab halls and iron foundries which had been abandoned when Saint Gobain bought Biwater over and closed Clay Cross down. The dark, grimy sheds were too interesting to ignore, and I photographed everything from timber casting patterns to an ancient furnace bank incorporated into modern buildings. On a later trip through the area, I discovered that the site had been completely cleared, and a white sales cabin spoke directly about what would come next.
Similarly, gully gratings come in many designs, but two of the most common in Scotland are the Grahamston pattern and Bo’ness pattern: both named after big industrial foundries in the Falkirk area. They are still available from McLuckie of Dalry, who have developed a theft-proof gully to foil the metal thieves who steal anything they can weigh in at the local scrappie – even if that meant leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the road.
Then you have the mysteries of life. I recall a Shone sewage ejector which lived in a deep shaft down by the river. Every now and then it would give a deep hiss and thump, leading the surprised visitor to ask "Just what do you keep down there?” It would have been no surprise at all if we’d replied that it was one of Tolkein’s balrogs.
Darkness proper had fallen at the distillery, so I turned my back on that sweet, rich scent of malting grain, leaving the labourers up to their knees digging out the sodden barley draff. They toiled for a whole week. And so the project's Contingencies were flushed away, and the Completion date went down the pan. Oh, let that be an end to the puns. Let's keep walking.
As in the Classical myth, Orpheus must not look back when he leaves the underworld – otherwise the site agent will catch him and demand yet another Architect's Instruction, to rebuild yet more collapsing manholes...
The aftermath of the recession is beginning to tell on the quality of new work in the northern half of Britain. However, earlier in the year, I had a chance to visit somewhere worth writing about in an unqualified way. High up on the edge of the moors in County Durham, on the site of a former steelworks, is the most powerful piece of public art in Britain. 
A former steelworks: but what a contrast to the former Brymbo Steelworks which I wrote about in 2012. Tony Cragg’s work, Terris Novalis, is protean. While I was still at architecture school, a huge remediation project was coming to an end high up on the skirt of the Pennines at Consett. One of the first acts of Thatcher’s government had been to shut Consett steelworks: in the 1960s it made some of the highest technology steel in the world, but in September 1980, the steelworks was shut down, ending 150 years of iron and steel-making in the Derwent Valley.
Visiting Consett today, it’s tough to find anything which stands as a memorial to the Consett Iron Company. There’s little trace of the huge integrated iron and steel works which once stood on the edge of town. By the early 1990’s, the site had been cleared and a cycle path built alongside the course of the Stanhope and Tyne Railway Line – the earliest commercial railway in Britain – by Sustrans, who have developed a national network of routes along the line of abandoned trackbeds.
Part of this railway remained to be the last working railway serving the steel town of Consett but when the works were closed, the line had little future and it too was closed in 1985. The route was substantially completed as a cycling and walking route by 1990 with the artworks being added between 1988 and 1998. 
Many of Sustrans’ projects incorporated artwork, and at Consett a sculptor was commissioned to create a lasting memorial to the ironworkers of County Durham. When Tony Cragg visited the site, there was nothing left of the steelworks, so he decided to call the project Terris Novalis – literally “new made land”. Once the sculpture was complete, a photo of it was printed in the Press & Journal, and after I’d marvelled at its originality, I clipped it from the page to keep in my shoebox of interesting things.
Cragg made maquettes of the Terris Novalis sculpture in 1992, cast in mild steel: but for the commission in Consett, he blew them up from two metres high to over seven metres high, and cast using stainless steel. They were installed in 1996, with the help of a massive crane. Fifteen years later, coincidentally producing design work for Sustrans myself, I recalled the giant instruments marching across County Durham on their strange feet. When you see it, in the flesh, Terris Novalis is a phenomenal piece of work.
It operates on many levels, from reflecting the craft of the steelworkers who built it which echoes generations of iron and steel production on the site, to the Brobdingnagian scale of a theodolite and an engineer's level which are 20 times the scale of the originals. They hint at the vast size of the former steelworks, and allude to the instruments which surveyors used both to construct the works, and to clear the site afterwards.
The sculpture’s instrumentality as a symbol of regeneration, is as striking as the mythology which Cragg applied to the armorial supporters – the many birds and animals whose feet support these huge chunks of stainless steel. It suggests a medieval bestiary: Terris Novalis’ closest relatives are the griffons and yales which filled the dreams of William Burges. That is fitting, because TN is an ark, carrying its strange cargo of beasts together with the sum of one and a half centuries of human endeavour in semlting coal, coke, ore and lime together to create iron.
I’ve trailed across Europe looking at lots of post–industrial sites, from Saarland and Volklingen; Zollverein in the Ruhr; the Ghent-Terneuzen corridor in Belgium; to the stalking cranes of Clydeside, and I recognise that each time a derelict iron dinosaur is regenerated, some public art is left to refract what went before. Each regeneration uses the civilising influence of public art in order to demonstrate how enlightened its patrons are. But none have the impact of Terris Novalis.
Not even the “Angel of the North”, which was commissioned a few years later and a few miles up the road, but adopted exactly the opposite approach. Terris Novalis plays games with hierarchies of scale, and keeps on resolving more and more detail the closer you get, whereas the Angel is simply big, in order to be taken in at a glance from the motorway. 
Anthony Gormley’s work has become postcard-famous as the symbol of Gateshead, and in so doing he has become one of the best known artists in Britain. Tony Cragg, who works in Germany, has slipped from public notice since his Turner Prize win in 1988. Perhaps that suits the slightly mysterious character of Terris Novalis: there is no plaque, sign or interpretation board to explain what it is, or why it landed in Templetown on the outskirts of Consett.
Terris Novalis tells a complex tale of the relationship between nature, man and technology whereas the Angel merely abstracts the plane which lies above mankind. TN is made from stainless steel, a magical material which resists time, whereas the Angel (as much as I love CorTen steel) is dissolving back into oxides. As a result, TN could be seen to represent man’s mastery over metals through the very processes which went on at Consett.
The Angel was conceived as an icon for the area, and public funds were poured into it, whereas it was brave of Sustrans to commission something so ambitious, given that their main purpose was building bike routes. They had commissioned sculptures before, such as the little runnels of “concrete poetry” on the Tarka Trail in the South-west of England, and cast iron quotation discs inset into the bike paths which criss-cross Bristol. 
However, the striding beast of Terris Novalis was the largest and by far the most ambitious artwork they’d tackled. Cast from solid stainless steel, from originals carved by Tony Cragg, the sculpture can be seen from miles away. At the time, it was contentious, because Cragg works in Wuppertal, Germany, so the stainless steel was cast in Düsseldorf – ironic, really, when it found itself landing on the site of a British steelworks.
Nonetheless, Tony Cragg was the right sculptor for the job, as he has an instinctive sympathy for the processes of iron founding and steel casting. As he noted in a lecture he gave in 1990 at UCLA in Los Angeles about his early career, “For one year I did a general course [at the art college], and at the end of that course I had a job working in a foundry near Bristol which made parts for electric motors, casting parts, and this was a really fantastic experience for me because the factory we worked in was a very, very long hall.
“It was about 200-300 metres long, very high and very black. We worked for 10 hours through the night, it was a nightshift job. I remember the way the moulds were prepared in sand and the metal was poured in the moulds, then the moulds were very slowly moved up the hallway, cooling down, and at some point they went over a shaker and the moulds would fall into the ground. 
“The red glowing machines came out of the ground on the one side, and the sand came out of the ground on the other, and there was a huge ever-growing cone of black sand. It was a job that I very much liked doing, a very physical job with a lot of excitement about it, somehow, just the process with the materials which I found incredibly exciting.”
The nature of the sculpture’s coming into being reveals the unalloyed truth about what we lost when Consett Works closed.
All photos are copyright Mark Chalmers: please contact me if you’d like to use them.
I’ve written about architectural photography before – and unusually, a few folk made the effort to comment, although presumably many others went “meh”. Having spoken briefly about technique, this time I’d like to consider the aesthetic attitude and specifically, how photography and architecture are moving in opposite directions in terms of accessibility to the medium.
Soon, there will be fewer folk training to become architects. In other parts of Britain, the universities charge fees. You have to work for at least two years after leaving university before you can sit your Part III exam, which means architecture is effectively an eight year course (3 + 1 + 2 + 2).
Many people take an interest in buildings; thanks to the rise of TV programmes like *Half the Dream Home for Double the Money*, but fewer of them really understand buildings. Back in the day, anyone could have a go at knocking together timber kits, but no private individual could ever erect unitised curtain walling. The techniques we use to put buildings together are becoming less and less accessible to the lay person.
By contrast, back in the same day many of us had a “point and click” compact camera, some enthusiasts had a 35mm SLR, but only the serious-minded few had roll-film cameras capable of taking the quality of photo which is required for publication. Fewer still would see their shots reproduced in the “mass media”. The advent of the web changed that, irrevocably.
Today, everyone is a photographer. The combination of camera phones with decent quality optics, such as the iPhone, and photo sharing websites such as Tumblr and Flickr, allows us all to propagate our work. Photography is becoming easier, if you accept the premise that automatic metering, focussing, and even aperture control will improve the quality of the average photo – but architecture is becoming more exclusive, and understanding its technicalities more involved.
Despite the democratisation of image-making, there is still a discernible gap between how the enthusiast and the professional work. The previous print edition of Urban Realm features a set of photos I took in a deactivated power station. They were shot using a digital back, then processed using Capture One software. This is a powerful combination, which you’d only use if you needed to publish the results. Processing hundreds of digital shots against a deadline can become gruelling and unpleasant, although taking them was neither of those things.
The next print edition of Urban Realm will features a set of photos I took somewhere derelict. By contrast, they were shot on transparency film using a 35mm camera. Taking the shots is the creative part, and as such it’s enjoyable whereas I suppose processing transparency films was hard work, before machines did it for you. Nowadays, I just send them off to the lab in a postage-paid jiffy bag.
Partly as a result of that simple workflow, I still use film for my personal projects. It’s entirely characteristic of the arse-for-elbow way things are, that I became interested again in film at the point when it began to disappear. At some point along the road, maybe 2005, I decided it would be apt to make photos of derelict buildings using a technology which was similarly coming to the end of its life.
Comme d’habitude, I knew that things would become difficult as film stocks and processing labs reduced in number, so naturally I wanted to try it, and to master E6 film’s unforgiving latitude. I started using Agfachrome RSX around 2005, and quickly discovered that Agfa had stopped making it in December 2004. The best film you could find was RSX II with a “use by” date of 2007 or 2008, although if it’s stored somewhere cool, the film should still be OK to use several years later.
My experience (for what it’s worth…) is that ISO 50 or 100 Agfachrome is still fine at say 10 years after its expiry date, although it sometimes has a slight tinge of pink or red. Fuji Velvia 50 tends to have a purple bias as it ages. Slow film seems to stand up better and when I’ve bought expired film which people say has been frozen or kept in a fridge, it’s usually like new. On the other hand, I’ve also shot a few rolls of very expired slide film from the 90’s, at least 20 or 25 years old, and it seems to become very grainy, the colours shift unpredictably and contrast goes. Fine if you like that effect, but it does tend to look like a cheap Instagram filter.
More recently (I wrote this at the start of 2013), Kodak has stopped making acetate base, the stuff which “film” physically consists of, and onto which light-sensitive chemicals are coated. Fuji is killing off its emulsions one by one – Velvia 50, Astia and Provia 400 were recently chopped. Nonetheless, film isn’t dead: after Agfa’s factory in Leverkeusen shut and was subsequently demolished, Fotoimpex in Berlin built a small film-coating plant using pieces of equipment from the former Agfa research dept. Similarly, some film is still manufactured by the remaining part of Agfa, at Mortsel in Belgium, and repackaged as Rollei.
Film is undergoing a "craft" revival at the moment, aided by the Lomo movement. However, it's never going to be mainstream again, and that's the problem. Agfa were geared up for the mass market, while smaller manufacturers like Efke or Rollei never expected to be more than niche players. The archipelago of factories which Agfa relied on made economy difficult to achieve, so Agfachrome RSX II in 50 and 100 ISO will never return in their former guise, sadly.
However, it became a touchstone for me, because RSX II renders colours in an authentic way. Not overly vivid, nor warm or cool: the greys are neutral, because its sensitivity isn't biased in any direction - yet other colours have a richness. The film is also lower in contrast than other makes, which improves the rendering of detail in shadow areas and the retention of highlight details, and its inherent crystallinity provides a nice balance between grain and acutance.
The dynamic range of films varies from five or six stops for Fuji Velvia 50 slide film, to ten or eleven stops for Kodak Ektar negative film. Agfachrome is somewhere in the middle. Likewise each emulsion has a unique toe and shoulder signature, in other words it deals with shadow and highlight tones in its own fashion.
In more subjective terms, Agfachrome has a more European aesthetic than other films. Kodak’s film stocks are warm and Disney-like, and the colours of most of Fuji’s products are super-saturated, and high in contrast. The result is that some shots I take with Agfachrome capture similar tones to Vermeer’s paintings, with earthy tones and rich shadows which hint at detail. Fresh Agfachrome film’s “curves”, how it renders a range of tones from the lightest to the darkest, show smooth gradations rather than clipping. Perhaps Agfa shares Vermeer’s Low Countries sensibility?
In the same way that traditional artists favour a particular palette, Ernst Haas favoured Agfachrome - he was one of the “Magnum” photographers who first mastered fine art colour photography, and the contemporary of Saul Leiter who I quoted in the previous article. Robert Farber made some wonderful images using Agfachrome 1000 as an aesthetic tool, where the grain of the high speed film drew an almost pointillist image. Late in her career, Fay Godwin moved away from the monochromatic landscapes which made her name, and I believe she used Agfa RSX to portray nature morte arrangements of frozen and flooded foliage.
The choice of film stock helps to define an approach and capture an atmosphere, although RAW converters like Capture One can also do that. However, more important than the particulars of any brand of film, is the fundamental difference between film and digital which few think about, an aesthetic sensibility which is lost with all the talk about digital sharpness, noise and resolution versus hipster notions of authenticity and reversion to the analogue.
Once you select which chrome film to use, you decide how to view the world. It’s all down to taste in the end - transparency film, with its non-linear characteristics has different properties to digital, such as a gentler roll-off, meaning it blows out highlights in a less marked way. Its narrow latitude means you have to nail the metering, because there is no recovery if you over-expose, yet early morning light can glow with a pink or golden halo emerging around a point source of light.
Some day, in the next few years, it will likely be very difficult to buy fresh colour transparency film. It’s more difficult to make, and to process, than colour print film. As a result, it’s getting more and more expensive. Monochrome film is simpler than either type of colour film – a silver-rich emulsion which you can even develop in a coffee solution – so it’s likely to stick around for good. Meantime, enjoy colour reversal photography while you can – especially the moment when your slides come back from lab, and you hold them up to the window, or switch on the light-box, and see them glow like jewels.
However, film is not better than digital. It's just different.
A story about photography, but with no images? Are you mad? If you want to see how Agfachrome RSXII-50 renders light and colour, please take a look at my “Cement” post.
The Torre de David in Caracas is a symbol of the worldwide housing shortage. The 45-storey tower was once part of an urban renewal scheme in Caracas. Today, it’s a concrete armature, half-filled with an army of squatters who claimed it as their own after the country’s financial system collapsed. It could only have happened in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez…
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
Across the world, planners argue about ways to provide large-scale housing. In Western Europe, housing is either left to the free market, or provided by the state. In the unrepentantly socialist Venezuela, the Chávista government had a permissive attitude towards land invasions, so squatting became a realistic option. As a result, Torre de David became “the tallest squat in the world”.
Until recently, la Torre de David wasn’t well known beyond Caracas, but the BBC ran an feature about it, then the New York Times picked up on it, and Domus magazine later covered it too. All were equally fascinated by its appearance, which carries hints of William Gibson’s or JG Ballard’s dystopian novels, and the notion of the tower being a “vertical slum”.
However, it was only when an installation by the Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich won the Golden Lion at last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, that the Torre in its current state was considered as a piece of urbanism. It was conceived as the Centro Financiero Confinanzas: a concrete-framed, curtain-walled tower block designed by the Venezuelan architect Enrique Gómez. The masterplan included a cluster of buildings around the tower’s podium, with luxury flats, a helipad, and a hotel. 
Photo: Iwan Baan
Construction began in 1990, propelled by David Brillembourg's financial group, called Grupo Confinanzas. It was almost complete when work stopped following his death, in 1993. With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy a year later, the tower was abandoned. All of Brillembourg's assets were liquidated by the collapse, and the Venezuelan government's insurance body FOGADE acquired the unfinished tower. However, the lower storeys lacked flooring, drainage, second fix joinery. M&E services were incomplete. Large slabs of marble, intended for a luxury hotel on the lowest six storeys, lay shrink-wrapped in plastic.
High rise stasis isn’t unprecedented: after the Empire State Building in New York was completed, many storeys remained as unlet shells until well after WW2. Similarly, after Siefert’s Centre Point in London was finished, some floors lay empty for decades. Like both, La Torre de David is a building born of speculation. It was the lynchpin of a plan to transform this area of Caracas into a financial district: it was one of many planned along a so-called Avenue of Banks.
The tower was also symbolic of the new money which emerged during the boom years of the 1980’s, quite distinct in its attitudes and approach from the “amos del valle”, or old families of Caracas. With new wealth came risk-taking, speculation, loss of control and eventually, total collapse… It seems that once the acquistive half of the human brain overcomes from the ethical half, a Financial Crash is the result.
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
First squatted in 2007, today around 750 families live in the tower, in conditions which some writers have described as a vertical slum. It’s the eighth tallest building in Latin America and squatters live on 28 of the building’s 45 storeys. “It doesn’t look good, but it has the seed of a very interesting dream of how to organize life,” suggests Alfredo Brillembourg, an architect and namesake of the building’s original developer.
La Torre de David is a good example of how people organise a society for themselves, when the larger super-structure of government, law and civic life around them breaks down. Although the building still lacks lifts, mains water, balcony railings and so forth, in a societal sense it works. The tower’s new residents hooked up electricity and created a rudimentary drainage system. Space is granted to new squatters for free, but they pay a monthly fee of around 150 Bolívar fuerte (£13) towards health services, recreation and security.
Its human worth is arrived at using a different calculus. Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, thinks the building has great potential: "What interests me more about Torre de David is its emergent ecology with small businesses, jerry-rigged services; it makes it an obvious candidate for a 'green skyscraper' experiment." 
Photo: Iwan Baan
Regardless of what many press articles say, la Torre is definitely not abandoned, nor post-apocalyptic, and arguably it’s not a slum, either. There are many practical examples throughout history of how expropriation works. It offends the established system of land ownership and capital markets, yet offers high density urban development where the “system” has patently failed to. It happens in direct response to a defined need.
La Torre’s closest relatives are Kowloon’s Walled City, bulldozed many years ago but recorded in an excellent book published by Watermark a few years ago; Lucien Kroll’s experiments in Belgium which provided a structural frame into which residents could adapt their own homes; and the Kabouters, the epitome of squatters who created self-sustaining communities during the 1970’s in the Netherlands.
The tower confounds many received ideas. It’s been compared to J.G. Ballard's novel, "High Rise", yet Ballard thought of the archetypal tower as a diagram of hierarchy. The rich and powerful live upstairs in the rarified air, while the poor stay close to the traffic fumes at ground level. Torre de David disproves Ballard’s vertical stratification: in Caracas there is a distinctly horizontal separation between towers for the rich and towers for the poor.
Photo: Daniel Schwartz/U-TT & ETH
Rather than Wall Street’s financial monoliths, which it sought to imitate, the Torre de David became a vertical favela - and of course Kenneth Frampton posited that the favelas are ”Italian hill towns”. This is a helpful model, and at one time the Italian hill town was on the syllabus of every school of architecture’s first year course.
It became an archetype – perhaps the best archetype of all – as it tumbles down the slope in higgeldy-piggeldy fashion. It’s more than picturesque: it’s a diagram of kinships and social ties; it responds to the lie of the land; over time it evolves, organically. Much beloved of cosmopolitan architects, the type who contribute articles on “my architectural travels” to the learned journals, the Italian hill town is an example of architecture without architects.
There were several outcomes in Scotland. One was the sprawling megastructure of Cumbernauld town centre; another was the way in which the suburbs nearby, like Seafar, ran up and down the contours to create a serrated roofscape. Today folk can’t see past the buildings’ bleak context, harsh microclimate and lack of maintenance. Nonetheless, the Planners’ original vision for Cumbernauld comes from the same root as those well-organised folk who live in la Torre.
Photo: Iwan Baan
Similarly, it was a dream of the socialist governments of the 1960’s to place Scottish social housing tenants in tower blocks. Had they been built on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, or Park Avenue in New York, the flats would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But in a Scottish housing scheme, their value is low. In Caracas, Brillembourg set out to create floorspace with a high rental value, but in its incomplete state with hundreds of sitting squatters, the tower’s capital value is even less.
Is there a lesson in Caracas for the Scots? Why didn’t we take over the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters at Gogarburn for bedsits, when Fred Badloss sank the bank? Perhaps because RBS was nationalised, hurriedly, to maintain the credibility of the financial system, and to shore up the distant government in Westminster which would have gone down with the banks. By contrast, the Torre’s backers were allowed to fail by the Chávistas.
That much is different, yet both countries have a housing shortage which hasn’t been diminished by their respective politicians. Now RBS is quietly handing back and selling off offices and branches as it contracts. Lloyds TSB is about to be split into two, in the so-called Verde scheme, and HBOS is similarly shrinking. It seems unlikely that any of their former property will end up housing those thrown out of their social housing for having “too many bedrooms” – although we can only hope.
Photo: Iwan Baan
So, could it only have happened in the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez? Thanks to our squatting laws, it seems very unlikely that a phenomenon like la Torre could happen here. Yet there are things we could learn from it. The Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich have studied ways to improve “informal settlements” around the world, using la Torre de David as a case study. Interestingly, they’re keen to explore Giancarlo di Carlo’s notion that the person and architecture should function as one. A simple lesson, perhaps, but how does it work in practice?
Well, di Carlo’s ideal social structure was none other than the Italian hill town…
Photos courtesy of architectural photographer Iwan Baan; and of Daniel Schwartz of the Urban-Think Tank at ETH Zurich.
Here is a link to the full set of Iwan’s photos - http://iwan.com/photo_Venice_Biennale_2012_UTT-Iwan_Baan_Torre_David.php
Here is a link to the full set of Daniel’s photos - http://dschwaz.com/2012/10/19/torre-david/
Once upon a time, Ricardo Bofill created the Palace of Abraxas, a great arc of monumental social housing towers in Marne-la-Vallée which were reputedly recast from an old cement works. Sadly, the idea didn’t catch on across La Manche, despite Charles Jencks’ enthusiasm for the form.
So, rather than Bofill’s post-modern monumentality, here is a vast but more honestly functional works which has been abandoned, rather like the grain elevators which excited Reyner Banham in “A Concrete Atlantis”.
All photos are copyright Mark Chalmers, 2013. Please use the contact form to get in touch if you’d like to use any of them.
The giants of industry crank themselves into gear for the first time in five years. Luffing jibs have appeared on Dundee’s skyline again, this time with brand new names on them. The economic depression turned many titans into an after-dinner burp – but soon there will be new things to design, construct and experience.
In the pits of recession, we needed a little guidance to get us through. So, here are some notes on the most important person you’ll come across in your career - whether in the latter years of architecture school, or early years of practice. I’ll try to explain why the relationship some of us develop early in our career is formative.
A long time ago, I worked with someone who I count as a mentor. He was in middle age then, between thirty and forty-five, a man while I was barely that. His youthfulness had been stripped away to leave intensity, and at his core more determination than in anyone else I’ve met. He was a progressive, a self-described lapsed communist, and he mistrusted academics who did not go out into the field, as he did. He was a practitioner.
Here is my experience.
It’s getting late in the evening. We sat in on a Planning Committee meeting. He wore a dark tartan shirt with a grey woollen tie; as he sat waiting, with his dark hair swept off his forehead, the heel of his hand lay against his cheek, a dog-end fumed between two splayed fingers.
In the chamber, the talk was quiet and trivial, like the voices of sleeping birds. He sat, absorbed, thinking. Inside a timber-lined chamber with its dead green drapes and points of light overhead. Application papers were spread in front of us, a notebook, diary, and ashtray. In the centre of the table – a metal tray with paper lace napkins bearing a water decanter and glasses lined up around it, upturned on their rims.
The talk turned. When the cue came to speak, he suddenly animated himself. He stood tall, looked candidly at the elected members in turn, and spoke in terms that were thoughtful, quiet, detailed. They knew he meant what he said - and there’s the lesson - and so I learned by example one way to deal with committees. His phrases stuck, for their intonation as much as the intent of the words.
He seemed to be willing another kind of architecture into existence, something with timeless value, but most of all architecture as a “discipline”. His dextrous fingers twitched with expression, as if reaching their tips towards a lead-holder.
To a few who hit it off with him, his face opened with candour, and he shared his confidence in you. It isn’t a systemic thing, it’s not something which can be taught, but can be taken in by osmosis and relies on a connection forming between humans, a meeting of minds. A nurturing environment comes down to one thing: finding someone prepared to discuss ideas with you. That’s all. Somebody to contend with and force you to test what you say.
To others he seemed dry and remote, and his insistence on clear-eyed truth was irksome. But I never saw that side of him. Instead, I gradually discovered that we had things in common, the roots and background of our parents were similar, surprisingly so, and I guess that created a level of fellow-feeling. From that grew trust and ultimately a loyalty that wasn't asked for or offered, but was there nonetheless, unspoken.
I owe him a great deal, but it’s an unacknowledged debt. Most of the valuable stuff sank in sub-consciously. Those were chunks of impenetrable rock and uncut diamond which would become character much later. I was reminded of the steel founders William Cook, who made the torso nodes for Heathrow Airport Terminal 5’s roof. Their guiding principles describe the same effort:
“Press on. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”
He demonstrated the role of a mentor - to show a glimpse of what might be possible. In some ways he was the most stimulating of the people I’ve worked with, but of all those, I disagreed with him the most. He might have had communitarian sympathies, but he was an individualist. How's that for contradiction? He took particular pleasure in playing Devil’s advocate with ideas, and was always on-the-one-handing/ on-the-other-handing. Albeit he knew when to balance those views, and come down with a decision.
He was very certain that original thought always pay off, and is recognised. None of what he produced was old, hack, or devoid of consideration. It was all fully thought-out and justifiable. That bore out his rigour, an obsession with integrity, and a bloody-mindedness about following things through.
Who knows which things I truly learned, and in what measure. However, like everyone else’s experience of life, the people who I learned from have become part of me. Those illuminations and examples were a life-saver on many a dark night – including when I found myself at a low-point a couple of years ago. Late one evening, I found myself standing waiting in the winter darkness in a godforsaken part of the country, pursuing something I then realised that I did not believe in. He gave me the mental strength to keep going until I found something more worthwhile.
I hope that if you’ve taken the time to read this, you’ve recognised something from your own life in it. Thanks.
Last year’s degree show at Duncan of Jordanstone was notable for the work of one student in the Masters Year, Sam Wilson. I ended up writing a review of the show as a whole for the AJ, and an in-depth feature on Sam’s scheme at Brymbo Steelworks for Urban Realm. His striking drawings were printed in both magazines, and here’s hoping he capitalised on the coverage he gained to find himself a job.
This year’s degree show forces the visitor to dig deeper, though.
The walls on Level 6 of the Matthew Building are hung with examples of polite rationalism, and sensitive conservation schemes. Evidently, there are a few Asplund juniors in the Masters year, amongst whom are the authors of an ironically po-faced Cartoon Museum, and a sub-Seagram scheme for Dundee’s main railway station. The restoration work tackles Slains Castle and the fortress at Dunnottar: both schemes are well-mannered but a little tentative.
By contrast, Magnus Popplewell’s drawings outline his idea to create an inhabited bridge spanning the Tay. Rather than dropping another “icon” on Dundee’s central waterfront, he proposes a three kilometre long megastructure. This is the one piece of ambitious architectural thinking on show at Dundee in 2013.
The bridge springs from a northern abutment above Seabraes, with student studios slotted into the frame, then flats for the general run, and retail units, leading to a hotel. By then, we are hundreds of metres out into the Tay and the accommodation thins out. Mid-river, there’s a jetty and – bizarrely – a basilica on an artificial island, founded on the kilometre-long Middle Bank, one of the Tay’s many sandbanks. Further south, there’s a navigation span over the shipping channel, known as the South Deep, before the bridge sweeps onto its southern abutment at Tayfield, between Wormit and Newport.
Popplewell’s clean, simple pen drawings owe something to Frank Ching, but present his concept coherently without any tricks of presentation. Neither is there the baggage of theory, phenomenology or mytho-poetics which often accompanies student schemes. It would have been nice to see a model, though…
Many folk have proposed a modern version of Florence’s Ponte Vecchio or Venice's Rialto Bridge - including Rem Koolhaas’ scheme at Rak Jebel, high in the mountains above the Persian Gulf, and Laurie Chetwood’s proposal for a modern “London Bridge 800”. Unlike previous examples of Living Bridges with huge towers filled with luxury flats, shops and restaurants, Popplewell’s bridge is linear and flat-topped.
The Thames is a small, sluggish river bounded by a city. The Tay is many times wider, and the volume of water which flows down it is greater than the three largest English rivers combined. As a result, the three kilometre long pedestrian deck crosses the Tay in one constant slow arc and evokes Corb’s “Project Obus”. Anything less would be gestural. It works on a variety of scales: the largest of megastructures; the public apparatus of a city; the structural gird; down to the domestic scale of rooms, and their fittings.
It seems ideal territory for a student thesis.
This course of action, choosing a hypothetical brief then allowing it to run to its conclusion, opposes “The Challenge of the Ordinary”, a brief which academics elsewhere have set students. That proposition was apparently brought about by a juror’s remark a propos the 3D Reid Student Prize - "We saw a crematorium, a monastery/ brewery, a "cidery‟ in a tower, a bench, a theatre and an exploration of the caverns of Naples. We did not see a house, an office, a warehouse, a hospital or a supermarket. Where were the schemes pushing everyday architecture down exciting new paths?”
This remark, as rational as it seems, betrays a lack of insight. This is not the intellectually sophisticated line which James Gowan took when he noted drily that, the more complex the brief, the more banal the solution; whereas the more banal the brief, the more sophisticated the solution. Rather than a challenge to think in a more sophisticated way, it sounds like a mere call for novelty. After all, what is “excitement”? Wouldn't resolution, sophistication, or articulation be more fitting?
Paradoxically, students in their final year should pursue unlikely ideas and unusual typologies – the so-called “unbuildable” schemes – whereas they should only tackle “straightforward” things like houses, offices and shops after 15 or 20 years of experience. The subtleties of the latter are learned by doing, whereas opera houses, monasteries and wineries will almost always be one-offs. As a consequence, their design will be informed by the study of precedents, operational research, and brief extension – the very activities in which students are well versed.
Unconvinced? Each modern opera house is a prototype; yet consider trying to design mass housing from scratch, without practical experience and hence without exposure to the norms applied by the firms who help you to realise it. Why not try to impose your own personal module on the ceiling, floor and partition grids of offices – or argue in the face of the British Council for Offices’ (BCO’s) logic about net lettable areas (NLA’s). Perhaps you could subvert social housing by trying something which ignores the prescriptive standards driven by the Housing for Varying Needs (HFVN) guides, and paid for by Housing Association Grants (HAG’s).
Do you already have a grasp of the concepts hiding behind those acronyms? If the answer is yes, it will undoubtedly spring from direct experience. A measure of that experience would be hard, although not impossible, to apply in a degree course, because we can’t properly replicate how buildings are born. The interaction of people and firms is just too complex, and both time- and cost-intensive. Crucially, much of the design process comes about as a result of actors offstage, and given that student architects are assessed as individuals, pitching them into a bear pit would not serve any real purpose.
Let’s return to The Challenge of the Ordinary. Since people never set up propositions for no reason at all, this one must spring from a considered attitude towards the world. For example you might take a narrow, vocational view of architectural training, one aim of which is to produce fodder for the big, commercial offices. That implies you should only learn to design what they design, build how they build, and have your ambitions delimited by their experience. Consideration of “everyday architecture” shouldn’t be restricted to certain typologies which the big commercial practices churn out.
An alternative is to consider a broader education which seeks to open peoples’ minds and offers them a fresh perspective on the world. Provide the intellectual tools and you have set them up for life, so that they can follow their curiosity where it leads them, and the more ambitious you are at this stage, the better. I’m with Mark Twain on this one – “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
Exploring the caverns under Naples is a perfect example of an opportunity which should be seized with both hands. Imagine being offered the chance to engage with history of the tufa quarries, find out how southern European urbanism works, and live for a while within another culture, society, language and climate. This isn’t just an “academic” point – I can speak from experience, having taken part in an ERASMUS exchange to Athens during my 4th year. In Athens, I learned a few things about architecture, and far more about people. I owe much to that opportunity.
My conclusion is that the course should build intellectual equipment, and broaden cultural horizons, rather than trying to reflect what happens in practice too closely. The vocational part of training an architect will come later, from the experience of practice. Ambitious briefs will help to stretch the mind; unambitious briefs may lead to a bounded imagination.
All that said – at the other end of the school, first year, is Hugh Ebdy’s habitat for an artist, at Kenmore on Loch Tay. One beautifully-composed sheet of pen-line plans and elevations, and a gouache perspective of the habitat, cutaway to show the warm cocoon of the habitat surrounded by the enveloping blue twilight of the mountains. Made from SIP panels, the habitat seems like a good place to be during the Scottish winter, a place to return to after a day’s exploration, to write up notes and fill out sketchbooks.
Between these two students, there are some well-resolved ideas and the promise of more to come. Underlying them, is a lesson about didacticism and how to equip students for practice.
ANOTHER POST? Don't you do anything else with your time? Don't you have a life? Yes, and each year my social diary includes the local degree show – this year, Duncan of Jordanstone is local, a couple of years ago it was ECA, and before that, Scott Sutherland. However, each time I visit a show, I end up ruminating about the whole construct of architectural education, rather than just the drawings on the wall.
The crits are over for another year, and wide-eyed graduates emerge, blinking, into the sunlight. The best of their work remains on the wall for a few days more, before disappearing forever into a portfolio under the bed in their parents’ spare room. In a few years’ time, the CAD files will be unreadable by the current version of Autocad, and the platter of the hard drive they’re stored on will stutter and skip, refusing to be read. If the graduate is lucky, the slightly-dog-eared sheets of Fabriano run through the Designjet will remain as a memento of happier days…
For now, though, those drawings are fresh and the ideas are up for scrutiny.
We have a fascination with the intangible means by which tangible things come into being. We make vain attempts to get closer to the work, and we struggle to externalise what goes on in other folks’ heads. Their work is tangible, but the thoughts preceding it are immaterial, so that in the end we focus on the creator, since we can apprehend the person more easily than the process. It’s easier in the case of architecture students, because the work is unmediated, and students are relieved if anyone takes an interest.
So, what is this architecture thing? Is it just as much about the architect as his or her creation? What do this year’s graduates have to look forward to?
We may visualise Scarpa, Lewerentz or Corbusier as a figure in dark, sober clothes: an old man, peering through glasses, thanks to poor eyesight born of decades spent staring at drawings. He leans forward, engrossed in laying lines onto paper; in front of him, a wall of shelves crammed with books, postcards, architectural models, interesting bits of stone, photographs and boxes of slides.
His nodding head and shoulders adopt the set of the anglepoise lamp clamped to the drawing board. His forearms sit on the cant of the board, along with a clutch pencil, a roll of detail paper and a box of aquarelles. At his elbow is an assistant – perhaps an a trusted associate, more often a recent graduate – someone who is grateful to be there, who may work long hours for little gain, in return for the opportunity to see genius in action.
The space is large, high-ceilinged, with northlight thrown deep into it by tall windows and diffused by raw, whitewashed walls. In the corner shadows are black steel planchests set onto a woodblock floor, and hung on the wall is a giant model consisting of layers of balsa and boxwood built up into buildings and contours. The model represents a whole city block, torn apart and recreated.
Hold on there son, Genius, did you say?
Kurt Vonnegut's novel “Bluebeard”, posits that three unusual and unlikely types of people are needed are needed for any revolution to be successful. Architecture, I guess, is no different.
“Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.
“The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius – a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
“The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."
“The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. "He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting," says Slazinger. "Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey."
“Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top – Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia's, Christ being the one in Christianity's.
He says that if you can't get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way.”
If the keen-eyed and keen-eared graduate is lucky, she may have landed on her feet. She may be in the company of Vonnegut’s first sort, the authentic genius. In which case, she’ll discover that the design studio is as important a creation as the image of the master himself – it is neither drawing office nor artist’s workshop, but a hive where the lights burn all night and in that, it replicates architecture school, where work sometimes continues through the wee hours, fuelled by caffeine and desperation.
However, architecture school still looms large in her mind. She is conflicted. From whom will she learn best: the professor who teaches, or the godhead who builds? She has a deep suspicion that the staff at the architecture school look upon the students as being Vonnegut’s third sort, the kind of people who open their mouth during crits and let their belly rumble. She suspects they view those students as Christmas turkeys.
A young woman – let’s say she’s Danish – pins up the drawings of her final scheme for a crit jury. After several days with little sleep, she is about to experience the serial inquisition which terrorises architecture students. She lays off for fifteen minutes about the concepts behind her design, the influences she has paid homage to.
The prof. sits with smouldering pipe, listening intently, then pronounces – “Aye lass, that’s aa richt and richt enough…” at which point he fixes her with beady eye, and continues with vehement emphasis – “but FAR’S THE LAVVIES?”
This is the knock-out blow, and having worked through the night, her resistance is low and she is quite unprepared for it. She fights back tears as she tries to engage this giant bearded man, with smoke issuing from his head, about “architecture”. He, however, is looking for a different thing entirely, confusingly also called ARCHITECTURE. It’s a practical art: surely you can see that? The crit is not a success.
Yet it is the image of the master, rather than the prof, which is the lasting one which students fix on. Having left architecture school, the acolyte takes her opportunity to get as close as possible to the fountainhead. Most of her time, she exists in a different place, with unstable computers, tins of dead Rotrings, and irate clients who telephone to ask why water is pouring through their light fittings.
Her other time – her “own” time, often late into the evening – is spent hunched over the master’s board, taking a junior role in debate, as sounding board, occasionally devil’s advocate. She may not contribute positively to the creation, but the master uses her to knock out the negatives (in both senses). Thus the scales slowly fall away from her eyes…
For my next post … I may actually get to the point, and do a review of the Duncan of Jordanstone Degree Show. Possibly the Scott Sutherland show, too.