on…

well… not rock and roll it seems. This from the online prospectus for a course by the London Consortium MRes/Phd course: “Shit and civilization: our ambivalent relationship to ordure in the city, culture and the psyche”:

“Our societies are, quite literally, founded on shit. Civilization means living in cities and cities are confronted, in a way more dispersed settlements are not, with heaps of garbage and ordure.

The course brings together two distinct disciplinary registers, architecture and the analysis of the built environment, and anthropology and psychoanalysis, to show this ambivalence. Thus the phenomena of the built environment and the cultural rules and psychical formations that seek to contain the pollution of matter out of place will be examined together. Shit in contemporary art and film will also be considered in the course.”

» http://www.londonconsortium.com/shit.htm

Excellent, excellent, excellent. Anne Galloway has started up a new blog devoted to space and culture, named: Space and Culture:

“My first and sustaining love is space and culture. My background is in anthropology and cross-cultural architecture, and I began my PhD specifically to study with my supervisor, Rob Shields.

Rob’s the editor of the academic journal Space and Culture, and while we redesign the web site, I thought we could start a Space and Culture Weblog. It will, of course, focus on all things spatial and cultural.”

It’s off to a good start, with BBJ faves Iain “Skateboarding and The City” Borden and Heckler + Coch already featuring… >>SUBSCRIBE<<

» http://www.spaceandculture.org/

The latest issue of Metropolis is focussed on the city of 2010:

“Forget the flying car, the personal jet pack, the bubble condo on the Moon. It’s not going to happen–not for the vast majority of us, anyway. Here’s what is going to happen–what’s already happening–in controlled design experiments around the world. Trains are becoming a lot faster. Information technology is telling us more about where we are and what’s happening around us. Skyscrapers are getting crazier looking. Green technology is making places cleaner and healthier. Builders of monolithic structures are figuring out that their designs need to be flexible, that today’s forward-looking design is tomorrow’s aesthetic hangover. The city of the near future is closer than you think.”

I keep thinking how timid we were in projecting CarFreeLondon as being achieved in 2020…

“Metropopular is an animated short film about what the cities of America would say to one another if they could talk.”

Couple of things:

• Enormous collection of links, content and bibliography on Place and Space
• Prof. Bill “City of Bits” Mitchell is talking at the Tate Modern on Wednesday 19th

I’ve started to re-read “Space is the machine” by Bill Hillier; and I’d forgotten the brilliant quote at the start by Sheep:

“…I thought that all that functional stuff had been refuted. Buildings aren’t machines.”

“You haven’t understood. The building isn’t the machine. Space is the machine.”

I’ll be back in London for the Bill Mitchell talk, so maybe see you there.

A snatch of a Ben Okri poem that is stencilled around the spiral ramps of the London City Hall building, by Foster and partners.

A piece of the Tao which we got taught in the first year of architecture college:

“Doors and windows are cut out of the walls of a house,
and the usefulness of the house
depends on the space where nothing exists”

In other words, or at least as was the emphasis placed at the Welsh School of Architecture; focus on the space, not the wall – while remembering the wall is what makes the space.

If I may be permitted a Joi-Ito-style namedrop and photo, I spent an hour this afternoon with Will from iSociety at MarksBarfield Architects. They designed the London Eye, and have a new project SkyHouse that plans to reinvent high-density living. As well as having a wonderful, wide-ranging chat with David Marks (above) and Steve, who is their IT guru – it made me realise just how much I miss architecture…

Jonathan Glancey get all used-universe on us:

“Today, many of us are unable, or unwilling, to change a fuse or even patch a bicycle tyre, much less repair a locomotive or build a ship. We are fast becoming a nation ignorant of how things are made or work even as the nation’s infrastructure crumbles around us. Who cares? What excites us, as the opening of the new-look Birmingham Bull Ring proves, is the passive consumption of shiny new gewgaws, most produced abroad, rather than the making of the practical machinery that gets us to our glamorous new shops in the first place.”

»Guardian: Can we fix it? No we can’t

“Real” ones, like Gropius, Lasdun, Mies, Corb…

» BBC4: Audio interviews: Architects