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Elements in Venice

6/12/2014

A visit to the Venice Architecture Biennale four weeks ago has not yet been reflected in this blog- an overwhelming number of architectural ideas and installations, a mix of the predictable and dull with the truly thought-provoking. As a first time visitor, the scale of the exhibition is daunting- even a two-day visit can't include everything on show, especially in the seemingly infinite space of the Arsenale building.

An approach critical of the modernist hegemony- related to the theme of Absorbing Modernity- is adopted in many of the national pavilions, including the British and French. Despite the familiarity of much of the material in the British show, the clear theme of a failed utopianism came through with invention and wit: the French did something more deeply critical and sometimes moving with a related analysis of post war architecture. Some were just wrong- the Swiss and USA for example- while others such as the Danish and the Austrian were delightful. The Chancellor's 1964 official Bungalow in Bonn was re-created- 'swallowed'- within the German Pavilion's space in a discourse about architecture and representation.

The installations in the Central Pavilion are a series of discrete and separately curated exhibits on individual building elements- the ceiling, the window, the roof, the stair and so on. Their content and certainly their interest varies widely, the scope sometimes too narrow, sometimes too wide, but the overall aim of establishing a discourse about Fundamentals removes the Biennale from its more usual preoccupation with the current. This, and the overall theme of this Biennale, are the work of Rem Koolhaas who once again proves to be a kind of genius with his overall direction, however flawed the gigantic exhibition may be.

Reconstruction in Biennale German Pavilion of German Chancellor's official Bungalow, Bonn by Sep Ruf (1964)

Ceiling Installation in hall of Central Pavilion Biennale showing suspended service ceiling and painted dome ceiling (1909)

Defeated by the endless succession of overlapping exhibitions in the Arsenale building

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Edwin Smith at the RIBA

10/11/2014

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Didmarton Church, Gloucestershire

The new exhibition gallery on the ground floor of the RIBA Building, 66 Portland Place London W1 is showing an exhibition of the photography of Edwin Smith, best known for his evocative and atmospheric images of British buildings and landscapes, used in a series of books published by Batsford and Thames and Hudson in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Weather and mood , complex compositions of elements and, often, the dramatic use of light sources give his vision of a lost Britain a very particular feeling. It's clear, even though he trained as an architect at the AA for several years, he was out of sympathy with the prevailing mood of post war optimism and practicality.

The show, curated by Valeria Carullo and Justine Sambrook, is unusual for an RIBA Exhibition in that it really is curated- the presentation and editing of the photographs, with worthwhile supporting material, makes for a show that is both inspiring and informative. It runs until 6 December.

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Camera Constructs paperback now out !

1/10/2014

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The paperback edition of Camera Constructs: Photography, Architecture and the Modern City, with additional colour pages and improved image quality, has just been published by Ashgate. It's £35, and available online for less.

Some extracts from reviews published after its initial 2012 appearance :

A brim-full compendium packed with a rich variety of relational investigations into photography, architecture and urban space. This volume…opens the box that will not close again- the box in which photography is no longer one thing, but instead is many things, differing in kind as well as in degree.

Claire Zimmerman

College Art Association Review

This volume offers an expansive range of conceptions of architectural practice- from the imagined spaces of the unconscious, to the pristine spaces of modern architecture, to the virtual fields of Google maps. This range testifies to the commanding influence photography has had on architecture.

Pepper Stetler

History of Photography

Photography is how most architects experience other buildings, through the feedback loop of architectural journals and now the web. Higgott and Wray detail how this promotes abstracted visions of architecture while pushing inhabitation, space and materiality into the background.

Eleanor Young

RIBA Journal

‘A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see’: as its title suggests, the book subtly and consistently reiterates Barthes’ point, helping the reader to focus on the object rather than the subject of the photograph, and therefore critically establish the parameters by which architecture is judged, validated and ultimately constructed…The book is cleverly curated to offer many disparate ways to appreciate the underlying thesis, accessible to all levels of reader...a valuable contribution to the ongoing evaluation of architecture’s relationship to its favourite medium.

Steve Parnell

Architecture Today

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Malevich in Space

17/9/2014

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Malevich Suprematist Paintings and Black Square

Malevich, one of the fundamental figures in the evolution of modern architecture, let alone modern art, is the subject of a major exhibition at Tate Modern currently and running until 26 October: Zaha Hadid has spoken about his importance to her development as an architect, which can be seen very clearly in her earlier, pre-digital projects. His Suprematist paintings- incidentally among the first completely abstract paintings- show a floating world, forms of coloured rectangles in a dynamic relationship to each other. But it is in Room 8 of the exhibition that the most exciting architectural work can be seen, and they need to be seen as their subtleties cannot be reproduced in photographs: a series of white-on-white paintings as well as two which show coloured forms in dissolution, take Malevich’s move into an immaterial world that much further. Here also is a series of ‘Architectons’- abstract white sculptures taking these Suprematist forms into three dimensionality- we see the promise of an architecture, however scaleless and unresolved technically, which show an idea of what modern architecture could have been be rather than what it was to become.

And what does it all mean? Despite the date of this work in the 1910s, not much to do with the 1917 Russian Revolution. Curiously, the curators of this exhibition seem to have expunged any reference to the spirituality which shaped his work. One version of his black square paintings is placed high in the corner of a room, the place for an ikon in traditional Russian homes, in this emulating Malevich’s own installation in the 1915 Petrograd Suprematist exhibition.The white space in his work is the space of infinity, both inward and outward:going beyond the world of material into the cosmic and transcendental. And the black square, which became his personal symbol, a representation of man and his creation.

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Interview on De Mare's photography

31/5/2014

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An interview with Bobby Jewell about my recent AA lecture subject isnow online at: http://conversations.aaschool.ac.uk/eric-de-mare-photography-framing-architecture

Canal Bridge, Great Heywood Staffordshire

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Re-reading Ian Nairn

21/5/2014

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There are relatively few writers on architecture who have a distinct voice and very particular world view. That architecture is an art full of emotion would scarcely be guessed from reading Nikolaus Pevsner or Henry-Russell Hitchcock, not to mention almost all contemporary writers. Those that can inspire as well as inform and enlighten include Ruskin, whose prose remains powerful even a hundred and fifty years later, not to mention Adrian Stokes whose writing is full of sensation and feeling.

Ian Nairn who wrote passionately in the 1950s and 60s is unique in his generation, and not much appreciated by architects despite his great love for the subject. Nairn’s London published in 1968 is generally seen as his master work- but apart from the little-seen Nairn’s Paris there is his valiant campaigning work against urban mediocrity in Outrage and extensively in the Architectural Review.

There has recently been something of a Nairn revival, with publication of an interesting critical narrative on his work by Gillian Darley and David McKie Ian Nairn: Words in Place, and the re-publication of his1967 book Britain’s Changing Towns. I’m surprised I hadn’t come across this book earlier but find his evocative portraits of sixteen cities and towns absolutely gripping, written at a time when Nairn could still be positive about the transformations brought by modern architecture. And in particular his appreciation of the contemporary transformation of Birmingham, almost universally derided and since destroyed: 'The two-level roundabouts work very well...for traffic is up and pedestrians are down, taking possession of the whole ground except for the elevated roads. It feels oddly secure… The Bull Ring has indeed turned out to be a success. There pedestrians...are constantly participating in the traffic, feeling the slope of the hill, yet in complete safety…inside is Aladdin’s Cave, a marvellous interlocking design that takes a low-level bus station, a market hall and the ring road in its stride…'

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Eric de Mare talk at AA

4/5/2014

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Stanley Mill, Stroud (built 1819) from the book 'The Functional Tradition'

I am giving a talk on the photography of Eric de Mare at the Architectural Association 36 Bedford Square WC1 on Tuesday 13 May at 6.30. De Mare developed a towering reputation as a photographer in the 1950s, particularly for his images of old industrial buildings, published in the Architectural Review and in the book The Functional Tradition. He introduced a new way of seeing buildings and the urban landscape, which shifted the contemporary culture of architecture in re-presenting what had been overlooked: but his work was also was shaped by a sensibility almost Blakean in its rejection of much of the modern world. His black and white images remain a powerful evocation, precise in their architectural quality, of worlds that are lost.

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Constructing Modernism in 'History Today'

29/4/2014

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Detail of Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, completed 1976 when modern architecture was at its most unpopular

My review article for History Today 'Constructing Modernism' has now appeared in the May edition. It deals with the historiography of modern architecture in Britain, the vagaries of how modern architecture has been written about and interpreted over the past eighty years or so. 'Years ago there was a general consensus on the history of modern architecture, based on the idea that the combination of engineering advances and avant garde art had produced an inevitable and necessary new architecture'...'Modern architecture has been a more than usually contentious subject in Britain... its widely perceived failure is a particularly British story, unfamiliar in, say, Holland or Brazil. This has been associated in particular with the failings of much modern housing, but as long ago as 1994 Glendinning and Muthesius's book Tower Block presented a calmly argued and extensively researched study of the history of social housing'...

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Golden Lane Estate

9/4/2014

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Recently talking to the AHRC/FAAP research group at the Royal College of Art who are examining architects' creation of modernist public space in London as part of an international collaboration with researchers in Sao Paulo, I was looking again at the creation of space within the (later much maligned) housing estates of inner London. While most of their designers produced pale versions of the Ville Radieuse- towers placed on meaningless pieces of grass- even in the earliest schemes, there were alternatives. The Goiden Lane Estate is on the northern edge of the City of London, built on a site mostly razed by bombing.

Built by Chamberlin Powell and Bon following the competition of 1952 it houses perhaps 3,000 in low rise maisonettes, with one bold tower block of 16 storeys. It incorporates- even in the heart of London- small private terraces and balconies as well as a combination of mostly hard surfaces, providing a varied and robust landscape. In this very urban site, no attempt is made to create something more delicate, and differences in level- echoing, but not preserving, the bombed-out basements of the buildings formerly there- add to its complexity. As Ian Nairn wrote in Nairn's London (1966)...'In a way (the buildings) are unimportant compared with the spaces between them...a real space out of statistical units of accommodation. There are half a dozen ways of crossing the site: along corridors, under buildings, down steps and up ramps. And it is all meant to be used, (with) new views always opening, faster than the eye can take them in..' While he seems dismissive of the highly successful design of its housing blocks, mostly two storey maisonettes in different configurations, not to mention its unique use of colour, Nairn points out its achievement in making a different kind of urban space.

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Easter Island Photographs exhibited at AA

22/3/2014

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Part of exhibition in Photo Library Corridor Gallery

An exhibition of my photographs of Easter Island is now on at the Architectural Association in London. In the Photo Library's Corridor Gallery, it displays 25 images of the island and its statues taken last December (see post below). Many thanks to Byron Blakeley and Valerie Bennett. Pictures are for sale !

AA Photo Library Corridor Gallery 37 Bedford Square London WC1. Runs until 30 May, Monday to Friday 10-1 and 2-6: and building closed from 7 April to 20 April inclusive. See also www.aaschool.ac.uk/PUBLIC/WHATSON/exhibitions.php

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