Exercises in Style - Reworked

In the 1930’s Raymond Queneau got the idea for his seminal work Exercices de style, while he was listening to a concert in which Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge was performed. He realised that the piece was divided into segments, which were all variations of the same theme. He was convinced that the same logic could be applied to a literary piece, and around 1946 he had composed 99 variations of the same theme. The story is simple; on a crowded Paris bus the narrator observes a funnily dressed man accusing another passenger of deliberately pushing him. A seat becomes empty and the man sits down. In the second scene the man is in a different part of Paris once again spotted by the narrator. He is advised by a friend to sew on an extra button on his overcoat. This story is then repeated 99 times in 99 different ways and styles. 

Rather than looking at these literary exercises as purely an experiment in style, I believe that it is more interesting to analyse them from a perspective of limitations. By representing a scene, whether it is through drawing, collaging or other  ways of visualization, we are constantly limiting ourselves through these tools and methods. Many times limitations are considered to be negative, but I think that Raymond Queneau shows in his book the wonderful potential of restricting yourself when telling a story. It allows you to focus entirely on the idea that is being conveyed. This way of thinking can be extended to situations where limitations are not self imposed. Whether these limitations are geographical, economical or practical, it is equally important to see the potential in them and use that to your advantage. In the context of the architectural publication, it is the way that each zine individually tackle these conditions that really define them and make them unique.

The two scenes are here interpreted by PAPER from an architectural point of view, loosely based on the work of Atelier Bow Wow’s Pet Architecture and Bernard Tschumi’s The Manhattan Transcripts. Below is the first chapter (Notations) from Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau:

In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He’s with a friend who’s saying: “You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat.” He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.

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Samuel Michaëlsson is a co-founder and editor of PAPER and is currently studying architectural visualization in Sweden.

The Possibilities and Limitations of an Extreme Environment - An Interview with David Garcia

PAPER: What is the background behind MAP, how did it develop as an idea leading up to its first issue ‘ANTARCTICA’?

David Garcia: The idea of the publication was mainly to try and transfer the discussions, the methodology and the design methods that we had in the studio and move them outside our practice. This was a way for us to get it out for a public discussion, and eventual feedback. So the intention was just to expose our actions. That meant that we wanted to represent what the studio was about and how it worked. The way our practice, MAP Architects (previously David Garcia Studio), works is to collaborate with the scientific community in its widest understanding to inform architecture with the challenges it has today which I think are quite specific, they’re much more complex than what they have been before. Mainly due to our denser cities and spreading communities, we are in touch with natural and artificial challenges which are quite extreme, whether it’s pollution, derelict infrastructure or political frontiers. The idea is to represent how we tackle those problems in a publication which for me had several aims; it should be very affordable, I wanted something that if you were just slightly curious, price would never be an issue. I wanted our questions to spread so that there was a feedback. That meant that magazines and books were out of the questions because of the amount of time it takes to produce but also the expenses involved. Very quickly I saw that the publication could express how we work; first we engage in research, and then we engage in design. It should have an aspect which was very objective, just a collection of data on a particular theme, and one which was subjective, with the language of architecture to engage with questions that came up from the research. That duality asked for a two page format. Facts. Design. Because it was called MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities) and it is linked to a map, the two concepts merged together very quickly into a folding map format. That’s how it came to be physically. We use three months of research with contact with experts and scientists. Then we take a pause where we debate questions that have risen from that research, and then we do series of three to four projects that take up those questions from a very pragmatic point of view or a very critical point of view, or even sometimes a cynical point of view.

The research side of MAP 'ANTARCTICA', the first issue of Manual of Architectural Possibilities.

P: So the studio was doing these kind of projects before you established MAP as a publication, was it just an extension of your previous work?

DG: Yes, it is an extension of our methodology. The only difference is that what we did at the studio were competitions or commissions and sometimes research projects. With regards to MAP it is almost solely speculative projects. Although some of those projects, funny enough, have then become real projects. Because there was interest and they have transformed themselves, but that was the only difference, it was a form for research and speculation without a necessary permission, but it has been a strange boomerang where sometimes those speculations have become studies and commissions.

P: The topics of extreme environments and disasters is something that seems to appeal to many, which is also mirrored in popular culture in recent years where films, tv-series and video games have been treating similar subjects as MAP; Contagion, Pandemic, Chernobyl Diaries, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., The Day After Tomorrow are just a few examples. What makes these extreme environments and disasters so interesting, and is it more relevant today than 50 years ago?

DG: I think that all themes rise from present contemporary concerns and sometimes they are very abstract, sometimes they are very concrete, sometimes it is a geography that we are interested in, such as Antarctica. It was an area that would be interesting to know what it was like as a continent and how it would compare in terms of its challenges. Some are a bit more abstract, like ‘ARCHIVE’. The transition that we have had in the past 50 years from analog to digital, what are the implications with regards to information and the built environment? Others are very physical but their apparent expression is much less tangible, which is the idea of ‘QUARANTINE’ for example. Although once we have picked up on a subject we touch on all these different histories and implications, I have to say we have never been influenced by a film or a fashion. I think it is just things that are in every one’s concern, whatever creative, or non creative, realm it is. The ideas of radioactive pollution has obviously had very imminent results from Chernobyl and Fukushima. That becomes part of the general consciousness and with regards to quarantine, I think it has been a constant concern throughout humanity literally. The fear of extinguishing through epidemic. It has also very direct implications today mainly due to the way we are interacting with nature, but also because we are moving and are in touch with the world in an overwhelming scale and speed. So I think that our themes come from general concerns that are also touched upon by many other fields.

P: The studio is, as mentioned, doing collaborations with many different institutions in various scientific fields. The research aspect is touched upon in a university environment, but many times in a problematic and naïve way, treating the research only as a justification for form or programme. How important is research in architecture, both in practice and in the university?

DG: It is naïve to think that you will become an expert at the fields that you are going to be touching, because they are very complex. But at the same time it is vital for any designer to come close and to collaborate with those who are experts in the fields of study that your design touch. Mainly because your design decisions are informed decisions that become much more robust, and I don’t believe in the pure artistic fancy as the only submission for any architectural design. I’m not saying it isn’t vital that there is a spatial quality that goes beyond the functional, I think it is. But I think just as strongly that it is important that building performs beyond the phenomenological. I think it also has to, as an element in the environment, be more than just a passive, static shell. It can be a performative shell, and that performance can be active or passive, meaning that it can engage with its challenges, not because it’s moving around but the way that it is implicitly designed. I do not that think those two aspects need to be put against each other but I think that ethically and for design robustness it is vital to understand as much as you can about the challenges of the context.

P: Is it different though in a university? Should the approach be different compared to practice where you have more resources and possibilities to contact the experts in these various fields?

DG: I think it is actually easier in the university because you have more time and dedication. In practice the resources are very limited, and even though there is an income from projects it is seldom the case that you can convince the client to invest in that type of research. Normally what you create is a parallel platform to the project so that it can be invested via public funding or alternative funds. The resources are again very specific and pigeon holed into what they should go in to. So for us it is a challenge to convince the clients that we should have more time and more resources.

P: What is the process like when it comes to deciding the themes and topics of MAP?

DG: The decision regarding what theme to explore is always on going, there is a constant discussion at the studio about ideas, projects and themes. There is a catalogue of possible themes which we brainstorm, it is an on going process.

P: One thing that we particularly enjoy about MAP as a publication is the way you can read it in so many different ways and different scales, as a poster on the wall as well as a small booklet for example. How important is the graphic layout of MAP, both in terms of readability as well as its visual impact?

DG: I would never call the publication a poster, although it can be used as one. Nonetheless, the graphic detailing is vital for us because we feel we would like to communicate at different levels. One is more immediate, where info-graphics is one very important tool to communicate basic facts through a graphical lens. We are very careful about the way MAP forms a single open page, a double page, a folded element and how you can read it from fold to fold. It has the power of the map as an object, where you can choose segments that you would like to read, and the index is actually expressed as a coordinate system, indicating longitude and latitude. It is also important how one issue of MAP visually connects with another. If you put all the issues that we have done so far next to each other the project pages communicate. There is always a territory that bleeds into the next, the rivers become fields that transform and connect the publications when aligned next to each other. For us it is very important that it is not only about content, but also about form and that they work together as well as possible. It is one aspect that takes a lot of time, we normally design five or six radically different proposals for each MAP, apart from the hundreds of versions during design development. There are many that are thrown out and redone and so on, so there is a lot of work on that level, and if we are not happy with the result, we postpone printing. A printing deadline is not a major factor for us and we would rather postpone it for a month than compromise the standards.

P: How do you approach information and come up with new interesting ways of presenting it?

DG: When we research, the most difficult part is cooking down the data we have gathered. We have to get down to the essentials so that MAP becomes a gate into information but not an encyclopedia. When we find the most relevant aspects we try to combine them so that someone rather quickly can come to terms with what we are dealing with. Once we have selected those parameters it is just a question of experimenting with different ways of communicating that data. There is only a small team working on how to present the data visually.

P: How many people are working on each issue of MAP?

DG: It changes during its production but I would say an average of four to five people. Sometimes there are twelve and sometimes three.

P: You mentioned that the publication is separated into a subjective and an objective side. Is there ever a danger that the research will become design-centered if these aspects are not separated?

DG: We are not allowed to design when we research because we do not know what we are going to be designing. At that stage we just want to know what is ‘Quarantine’, what is ‘Antarctica’, what is ‘Chernobyl’? It is only when we have identified some of the questions, problems and challenges that interest us that we engage with design, and that happens after the research is done. Once the design phase begins there is once again feedback from the experts in the specific field. Some of the projects are extremely pragmatic. Others are much more subtle and are critically aimed at construction methods and social or political aspects, and some of them are in fact satirical and cynical in their approach.

P: What projects have been developed into real life projects?

DG: The Maldives Habitations is a project that has become an ongoing subject of research for the government, which in turn has produced other small projects. The Iceberg Habitation has received focus of attention and has also been tested at different scales. We believe that all of the projects that we create could be realised. We do not think that we are doing any science fiction. Even the most radical ones, such as the Iceberg project. All you need is a caterpillar and then start by making a whole into an iceberg. I feel that all of the projects that we have designed, even if they might appear very strange or unusual, are possible. All you need to do is to engage technologies. The Zoo for contaminated species is the most radical one, but it’s not science fiction, it’s just a big hole in the ground with a dome. Some of these projects are just the most simple solutions to the problems approached, the ‘Ready Made Antarctic Base Station’ for example is a project where you would just land a series of retired air crafts on Antarctica instead of Arizona to create a work station. For us they are just alternative  ways of engaging with the built environment, but I don’t think we make any of our buildings float in the air or stand by wishful thinking. I think what we challenge are other aspects, we challenge ways of design and building that are not necessarily traditional ones.

The Maldives Habitations - a project by MAP Architects that is now materializing.

P: What is the next extreme environment for MAP to investigate?

DG: The next MAP is focusing on Greenland. It is special, because it is the only MAP so far that does not only present projects designed by us. It takes the work that we have done for the Venice Biennale this year where the Danish pavilion selected four architectural teams to tackle different challenges on Greenland. We thought that the research was so thorough that it could easily be a MAP. It is essentially going to be about Greenland and its challenges and at the same time a collection of projects by the different teams. MAP Architects and Henning Larsen Architects formed one team, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) and a Greenlandic studio called Tegnestuen Nuuk formed a second one. Another one consisted of Vandkunsten, Qarsoq Tegnestue and Clement & Carlsen. It was a one year long research process where we visited Greenland twice and collaborated with the local architectural practices.

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Architect David A. Garcia is founder and principal of MAP architects. He is the editor and publisher of the international publication MAP (Manual of Architectural Possibilities). www.maparchitects.dk

He was interviewed by Samuel Michaëlsson and Hugo Losman on the 20th of November in Lund, Sweden. 

Hugo Losman is a third year architecture student at the School of Architecture in Lund, Sweden.

On Public and Private Space

From ‘an Interview with Cedric Price,’ Issue 1, Polytechnic of Central London Architecture Society:

The assumption that hobbling over the cobbles round the backside of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture is going to cause rich, random, social intercourse amongst the populace is foolish. I think a traffic jam in a square in Rome is probably more humane, even if its on the nasty side; at least the emotions are roused.

The University of Westminster used to be called The Polytechnic of Central London and in those days its architecture school occasionally produced a publication, it was called Issue. The first volume of Issue was published in February 1979, its theme was ‘Public Life - Public Place’. Not surprisingly, it is a theme which continues to fuel architectural discourse to this very day. However, what has changed since those days is the rise of the personal computer, or to be more precise of digital technologies more generally, as an active ingredient in the way life is lived in the modern city. Since, as we shall see, the notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ already were hopelessly inadequate as a means of articulating the organisational patterns of the modern city, the value of using them today seems doubly doubtful. One item featured in Issue 1 was an article by Richard Goodwin, consisting in an interview with Cedric Price. In answer to the question ‘what is public life’ Price offered the following, important, observation:

I do think that public life, as a general term, is difficult to define. I don’t think, necessarily, that the congregation of a crowd has anything to do with public life: you can have very lonely people in a bus queue. The only common factor is that they all want a bus, and there’s a certain amount of unspoken manners being operated, that they make a queue. But it isn't a very public activity. 

Here Price was making the point, there are numerous places in the modern city, necessary to the functioning of the city, that have been designed to support activities that are essentially private and personal. Price gives the example of the bus stop to make his point, but other contributors gave other examples.

In an article by Stuart Knight the problem of the use of the terms ‘public’ and ‘private’ is confronted head-on: 

Problems seem to emerge when definitions of activities related to public and private life are articulated. Problematic because what are now seen as attributable to public life are in fact aspects of private life. Consumer goods, and the variety of buildings housing them, are related to the necessities of life and, therefore, part of the private domain, as are the consumption of food and drink, the purchase of clothing etc. Indeed, the buildings which house these ‘activities‘ display the ‘intimate’ qualities of domestic life, boutiques are redolent of dressing rooms, restaurants of family dining rooms, and department stores construct domestic interiors in anonymous volumes. ‘Advanced factories’ are designed with ‘T’ groups in mind in order that workers can ‘relate’ to small production groups - modelled on the family - working at their own pace, in ‘personalised’ zones. Similarly, London Board schools of the 19th Century - one of the many ‘public’ monuments of the Victorian suburbs - are demolished to make way for schools arranged and articulated as a series of home based units, complete with pitched roofs and domestic interiors. A domestic ‘image’ which has been destroyed in order to build ‘rationalised’ ‘social housing’ at whose base the school hovers as a bathetic irony. The categories have become reversed the ‘private’ housing has become ‘public’ and the school has become private. Just as the hospital, associated with sickness - a private concern - and from the 15th Century located in a domestic building, even in the 19th Century the cottage hospital was the rule, is now located in a public building complete with airport lounge foyer and attendant ennui, escalators and shops. A third category has interceded here - the social...

The ‘social realm’ gathers together all those characteristics of the ‘private realm’ which are capable of rationalisation - a continuous and ever expanding project - into a society of collective, and assumed, unified interests. The model utilised is that of the family, the purveyor of norms and standards, and is projected as the paradigm for all organisations from the school and commerce to local, national and international institutions and governments. This begins with monarchical rule which posits the ‘royal household’ as the principle and ultimate family of the state who sanction - in the constitutional variety - the apparatus of government; and culminates in the modern bureaucratic state in which no one rules but many manage. In Sweden for example, one third of the working population manages the remaining two thirds, who engage in productive work (About the same proportion as the Polytechnic of Central London). In the democratic state no theoretical debate takes place in public or private since there is no theory only the pragmatic elucidation of norms, standards, procedures and conventions applied mainly to the issues that are the preserve of the private realm...

Instead of ‘private’ and ‘public’, Knight was suggesting the concepts of ‘social’ and ‘intimate’ as more appropriate if we want to theorise the kinds of places and their functioning that arise in the modern city: 

The rise of the ‘intimate’ takes its place in opposition to the rise of the ‘social’, particularly in the last hundred years, where ‘modern individualism’ asserts itself as an incapacity to be at ‘home’ with the conventions and conformism of society or the nihilism implied in existing outside it....This unhappy dialectic accounts for the rise of poetry, music, certain forms of ‘modernist’ art, and that uniquely social form of writing - the novel; and the subsequent decline of the most public of arts - architecture, dependent as it is on characteristics derived from the public, rather than private domains.

Fortunately for architecture, the unhappy dialectic, to which Knight refers here, is based upon a misunderstanding, on the ideal of a perfect state of being, in which human life elegantly unfolds into activities and places that are uniquely and absolutely ‘private’ and ‘public’. However, just because it is based on a misunderstanding, does not mean that architecture is immune from it; the ideal of public & private is a problem for architecture and needs to be addressed, in theory, before it can become effective in practice. Unfortunately - and this is where Knight is correct to draw attention to the domain of the ‘social’ as a specifically modern phenomenon - since theory is not an issue for ‘social’ space, so has it tended to disappear from architectural education. But, without theory, architecture has no place in which to work away at its concepts, testing their validity and asking if they are true or false. The lack of theory in architecture schools makes architecture vulnerable, leaving it incapable of accounting for its productive value, either in the past, the present or the future.

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Doctor Watson teaches Architecture at the University of Westminster and she is the inventor of Air Grid, a colourful but mute lattice structure that has recently evolved into an animated population of flying computers, known as beetles. The record of the change is the subject of her new book: UTOPIAN ADVENTURE: The Corviale Void.

LIMITATIONS - a panel discussion on architectural zines

Make sure not to miss this event with fantastic guests! 

We will also be launching the ninth issue of PAPER concerning the same theme (LIMITATIONS).

Hope to see you all there:

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London Architecture Diary

Between: Dreams

Post WWII Amsterdam

Imagine a city ravaged by war. Imagine the citizens and their memories, their relief, their hope. The city structure has been ripped apart. Something new has to come, but let us pause at this moment for a while. 

The grid has turned into shambles that create space charged with nothingness, ripped memories, but also potential. The structures still standing were lucky to live through the war, or maybe they have to live on with terrible memories. Either way they will be treated as heroes and will serve as reminders of how the people made it through. The people and the heroes have something powerful in common, together they form a powerful Collective. 

The destroyed city is the collective space. The possibilities and dreams are limitless in number and extent. Until the Strong Individuals launch new plans, sing the songs of their future and take the air out of the Collective’s chants. New monuments of men will be built, no doubt handsome, functional and necessary. But they will be selfish. The architecture is selfish and always will be selfish.  

This is the given climate and it is why it is necessary for the architects to define their roles, to keep their morale and legitimacy.

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Hugo Losman is a third year architecture student at the School of Architecture in Lund, Sweden. 

Water Towers of Ireland, an interview with Jamie Young

Jamie Young is an architecture graduate who attended University College Dublin. Since graduating Jamie has been involved  in various projects working with Dublin City Council. These include a research document on Mountjoy Square for Dublin City Council and a research project on alternative uses for overlooked sites in Dublin’s city centre as part of the group PRACTICE. This work culminated in an exhibition, “space|overlooked”, in Dublin Civic Trust which will run until the end of the month (February 2012). He is currently the coordinator of Waterford Pop-up, Waterford City Council’s new city centre rejuvenation scheme. 

Water Towers of Ireland began its life as an eagerness to engage people with these artifacts which pepper the Irish countryside. Being from Ireland myself when driving through the countryside, I notice these lonely objects which are always distant. They appear to be forever on the horizon which is tantalizing. Some might call them an eyesore on the landscape but I think Jamie’s project has succeeded in bringing these towers to life. His project is reminiscent of the work of the Bechers who documented and are continuing to document industrial structures including water towers. Their work has more of a scientific character, a catalogue of structures before they are dismantled and lost. In comparison Jamie’s project which now includes maps, drawings, polaroids and prints, give each water tower an individual quality. The portraits personalize the towers and invite us to look at them up close. Jamie exhibited his water tower portraits at UCD and a piece is currently exhibited at the MadArt gallery in Dublin. He describes the project as “part inventory, part photographic essay and part history”. The project has gained exposure through notable online publications including BLDG BLOG, Archdaily and Architizer.

Nine water towers documented by Jamie Young

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Fearghal Moran: What drove you to document water towers, and what is it you found interesting in these monolithic structures?

Jamie Young: The role of water towers in society has always fascinated me. Far from being objects of a singular function, they have found ways to be useful beyond their intended use. Through their prominence on the landscape, they force their way into the lives of locals. When I was growing up, the closest water tower to where I lived became a weekend hangout and drinking spot. Now, the same tower stands in disuse, covered in antennae for a mobile phone company. It is their visibility though, through  always being built on high ground, that gives them their most interesting use as landmarks. While this seems obvious, it didn’t fully strike me until I was researching and trying to compile a list of those still standing. One of the ways I located towers was through them popping up in Google searches in property website listings – “continue along that road until you see the water tower.” “straight on through the woodlands and pass the water tower.” “turn left at the water tower for Fennells Bay” This interest, along with a want to find some focus in my photography and the necessary completist personality to track down and photograph 200 of anything, led me to secure some funding and hit the road. 

FM: Your images go far beyond just documenting these towers, they are presented like portraits each with their own unique character. Was this your aim when you first started and how have people reacted to the portraits?

JY: The first tower I photographed was at Castlemoyle, New Ross. Through this visit and the time I spent editing the images, I began to get an idea of how I needed to exhibit the work. On entering New Ross from the south, the tower is visible above the town. The closer you get to it, however, the harder it becomes to pinpoint as it disappears behind rows of houses. Though in this case the water tower is situated in the middle of a housing estate, it is true that in most instances the majority of people only interact with these objects from a distance. This realisation, together with how the images show up the texture, structure and weathering of the concrete in detail, made me realise that I needed to print the images as large as possible. For the exhibition this turned out to be 24 x 16, which made for a nice poster feel and worked well in that particular space. People were allowed to get close to these large prints and, in effect, get face to face with something they so often would only view on the horizon. 

Stepping away from the hard documentary style of the Bechers, synonymous with water towers, I try to give these images an emotive value and sense of place. I approach the work as portraiture and hope to convey the subject’s personality, as any good portrait would. The response to this has been one of recognition. People tend to look for the tower where they grew up in amongst my photos and leave more aware of passing them on their travels. The most extreme example of this is the set of photos I have received over the past year from a friend in Singapore. Since seeing the project online, he has been photographing any water towers he comes across and emailing me the results.

 Concrete Cooling Towers by Bernd and Hilla Becher

FM: Most of the structures that you have documented are uninhabitable. Could your project be a way to make them more alive and not just landmarks?

JY: It was later in the project when I first started giving this some thought. After Geoff Manaugh’s post about the project on BLDGBLG, other articles started showing up on various sites. Archdaily asked the question, “If no longer in use, what can be done to take advantage of these stand alone structures?”.  While I like the idea of these brutalist structures being left to ruin, it seems like a wasted opportunity given their varied and interesting forms. Though this project will never be about re-purposing the structures, I have given the issue some thought.What the original design offers in each case is height. Giving access to this height offers a view. Offering any view in Ireland immediately brings tourism to mind. These are the kind of points that have come up time and again in any conversations I have had with people about how to make use of disused water towers. I have tentative plans to run a design competition for students later in the year to look at this exact problem. 

FM: Can you see any patterns in the form of the towers? Are they regionally different and are they shaped by function?

JY: The primary patterns in their form are based on technology. While stripped to their basic function the towers are extremely simplistic – made of two parts, a container and a structure to raise this up – how this is achieved has changed over the years. The earliest substantial towers were made of metal tanks raised up on legs or placed on top of an existing masonry structure. These were most commonly seen at train stations across the country, feeding the steam trains of the day. A large number of these can still be seen, with a few still occasionally in use. Early concrete towers were small, had square tanks and between eight and twelve legs. Over time, and with the development of the material, tanks became round, the number of supports grew fewer and the towers became larger. This brought us from the eight-legged tower at Killeagh, Co. Cork (built as apart of an intended Royal Army Airship Station in 1918) to the now infamous, single chuted Sillogue tower of North Dublin. Regionally, the early towers would have differed due to the local ironworks that manufactured them. Nowadays, while there are similar towers, this is down to the same engineering company being used and can happen anywhere n the country. The most distinctive example of this is the tower at Kildalton College, Co Kilkenny and its sister tower at Gaybrook, just outside Mullingar. Both were built by MC O’Sullivan Engineers.  

FM: I was intrigued by how Geoff Manaugh described the water towers as “prisons for water”, is this how you would describe them? And if not what immediately springs to mind?

JY: As part of my first year studying architecture, the class went on a trip to Inis Meain, an island off the coast of Galway. On the west end of the island is an impressive cliff face, on top of which are huge slabs of stone. From here, looking back towards the fields, you can see what at first look like quite inactive sheep. They are in fact small boulders of a yellow stone carried there by glaciers and dropped as they melted. These non-indigenous rocks are known as erratics. When beginning my work on water towers, this memory came back to me again and again. I began to associate the conspicuous nature and otherness of these stones with the towers I now saw everywhere I went. In my writing on the subject you will come across the phrase “erratics of our everyday landscape” repeatedly. This has always summed them up for me. 

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Water Towers of Ireland is ongoing and currently seeking funding. The ultimate goal of the project is to document each of the towers still standing and gather this information into one publication. For further details on the project you can visit:

Website
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Twitter

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Fearghal Moran is a third year architecture student at the University of Westminster.

The Backyard of the Olympics, an interview with Iain Sinclair

Samuel Michaëlsson: In the first chapter in Ghost Milk you are talking about Stratford and East London and how it used to be. What makes the area so special and how should architects and urban planners relate to this?

Iain Sinclair: Stratford in the time that I worked there, in the early 1970’s, was special because it still had the quality of an independent town, separate from London as such. It was a staging post on the road out to Essex. It still had a distinct flavour of being a part of Essex and the Essex mindset, as it was of London. It had a sense of its own history as an industrial place, and has a railway hub because there was so much heavy goods being transported through the area.

Coming to work there, the interesting thing for me was to see this totally provisional landscape, it was partly made up of its decaying industrial past, and partly made up of marshlands and wild nature as it still survived. It was a very mixed and unresolved place. I think that was why so many slightly subversive businesses got into the area, scrap metal dealers, travellers, and then on a large scale the Chobham Farm operation we were involved with. It was an attempt to circumvent the docks and the Union regulations on the docks by bringing container loading inland and not having to employ dock labour and doing it very cheap, and using using the closeness to the rail link and to the road links to operate there, which was kind of a prevision of the mindset of the Olympics but on a much grander scale; this idea of taking a run down area because its cheap, and because its slightly off the map and making it into a new city to regenerate the capital.
 
On the first instance when I was there, there was no notion of creating legacy or subverting the entire district, it was just about one business in one particular place. Now this is one total vision imposed by global capital. To me it’s an invasion, it’s like going into Baghdad or something because now you have got this huge level of surveillance (there will be more troops employed than in Afghanistan, for the security of the Olympics). You have made public land private in the sense of creating check points and customs barriers and I have already been asked to provide my passport to go on to the site by water. If you get a boat in Old Ford Lock you have to turn up with your passport and have to go through security checks. This is on your own doorstep, so it feels very strange and peculiar. 

It’s a piece of captured land underwritten by series of competing descriptions about what the future might be whereas really nobody knows, it’s juggled on a day to day basis. One day the stadium is going to West Ham, the other day it’s not going to West Ham, then it’s going to be multiple use that may come down and this and that may happen. And the reality that you end up with is this is sort of satellite attached to an enormous Australian shopping mall. The overwhelming sense of it at the moment is this gigantic mall that is immediately connected to the station and allows you access to the Olympic site, it’s a bit of parkland attached to a major commercial development. Now it also seems more of a city than Stratford itself, because Stratford when I was there was still an old fashioned high street with pubs that had been there because they served the road as it passed through and a lot of small businesses, and that slightly changed into a shopping area that was there before this one (Westfield) a sort of minor series of interior markets and malls. They were pretty low budget and have been totally overtaken of what is happening right now. As a generator of employment all it’s doing is creating low level shelf stacking jobs, giving jobs that really seem very artificial. It’s not like where you could before had learned printing or you could have been part of an industrial process that actually became something significant. Now you are just employed at the lowest possible register.

The architecture as it evolved seems to me almost post-industrial, you don’t get a sense of even an architect working. And the one building that is worthy of note, the Aquatic Centre (by Zaha Hadid), has been boxed in so much that it could have just as well been a concrete factory now. The curve and the style of it as you see in the original drawings, because of the Olympics you have got these two claddings (spectator’s seating) on either sides to hold the spectators and it does not look like anything at all, there is no sense of that sweep or scale. And it does not relate to the Olympic Stadium, it does not relate to the art work which is simply there really for its size. Kapoor or Anthony Gormley get these big art works become the icons of a zone, but it looks like an argument with itself because the nature of the steel the structure seems to argue with this necessity to have this safe viewing platform that people can go up. The two elements pull against each other.

All of the site is like that, there are so many different competing zones done by different people that there is no integrated architectural vision compared to the similar zone in Athens which is very striking architecturally, even though it is now an abandoned wasteland. There is nothing that relates to the area. There is some talk about regenerating the waterways around the area but even when that is looked at it’s not really true because somewhere like Pudding Mill River which came through where the Olympic site is was already being regenerated by planting carefully around the turn of the century and now that is completely enclosed and the water table is more polluted, it has got thorium that has run off all the radioactivity on the site and damaged the waterways in the same way. 

SM: There is a short term thinking at play?

IS: Yes, there is political convenient thinking, short term thinking. All the stuff about preserving natural habitats is total nonsense in terms of bio region. You have to have a permeability for natural wildlife to move through zones, you can’t say that this zone belongs to such and such. It does not work like that, by creating barriers you absolutely killed it in terms of its ecosystem because it is a sealed off zone. I don’t see any way it’s going to work other than creating an imposed structure which will take years and years to be absorbed into the nature of London. Which will happen eventually, because whatever done is done and essentially the city and its nature and people will come to terms with what is there and find ways of using, it adapts, but there is nothing really to boast off because you can’t really create it in advance.

There were these schemes that were previously created like Victoria Park which is nearby. In the mid 19th century it was made as a ‘People’s park’ rather than a Royal park because there was so much poverty and overcrowding in the East End. To create an open space, a green lung, was very valuable and that park has been partly destroyed by these overlapping developments from the Olympic site. So much of it has been closed off, the lake has been drained and the wildlife has been driven off. A lot of the Olympics is doing the opposite of what it says it’s doing.


SM: The London Olympics is claiming to be a more sustainable and legacy driven than previous games.

IS: It only seems to me to be sustainable by the permission of an enormous development. If Westfield was not there the whole thing collapses. It’s not self sustaining, it’s sustaining by the patronage of a commercial entity that you will have to give very special permissions to. 

SM: Sustainability is also such a word that will have to be scrutinised alongside with successful. Is it commercially or socially successful for example.

IS: You can never tell if it’s going to be socially or humanly successful until that happens. If you look back at other examples it has not been born out, the Millennium Dome in terms of financing was a disaster, it was a structure created that was supposed to regenerate this piece of land but it did not work and the thing itself had not content, so you end up spending millions and millions of pounds for essentially an empty tent until it’s taken over by a completely commercial entity. An American right wing fundamentalist millionaire opens it up as a showbiz hub, which inside feels really like any other mall with coffee outlets and the usual global franchises scattered around and a venue for rock events. This has all happened with enormous amounts of public money. The original remit was that there would be no car parking there, you would have to come by public transport, but once it that was taken over by this entity all that became car parks. That is a kind of scale model exactly of what is happening here (Stratford) and there is a certain element of housing, but it feels like an absolute island in the middle of nowhere because you can’t get around the fact that the only crossing of the river is through the Blackwall Tunnel so there is traffic pouring out, almost to the point of breakdown every single day. Then you put this thing right next to it, pouring more people in. If you wanted to sustain or develop the area they would have to build a bridge across Beckton, but they never did.

Already for the Olympics you will have to close down roads and persuade people not to come to work in London, universities (London University) are going to be given to athletes. All of these things happen that are socially destructive, theoretically for a short period of time but I think for a much longer period of time. 

SM: The Olympics has since the 1970’s been a tool of regeneration. Wouter Vanstiphout wrote in his article Back to Normal:

“...urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental. Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgement on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they  are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture”

Do you feel that this is the type of regeneration that is happening in Stratford?

IS: That seems very accurate to what happened in this area, because that whole Lower Lea Valley and Hackney Wick area was exactly that, it was a zone whereby all the slightly undefined or anarchic or libertarian groups settled. There were a lot of people living on boats on the river, who now have been put under pressure to pay and to move and to become more formally adjusted to the city. There were travellers who were actually often living under motorway bridges and scavenging for scrap metal out of the river and keeping the river clean by doing so. And there were people who just wanted to form communities that were living in small tower blocks there much cheaper because they were way off the scene and those have been pulled down and destroyed. All of these arbitrary and random communities who grew up in an edge-land have been pushed away for a much tidier narrative that is imposed from above. It’s very theoretical, and can never born out in actual practise, because you can’t manoeuvre huge tranches of people in this area just because you have got the area right for them to do it. The housing is often too expensive, and the public housing element is often the worst flats that no one would want to live in because they are in the middle of the road.

The organic communities that have evolved and been developed for a very long time have been scattered and destroyed. Something like the Manor Garden allotments which was a big patch of allotments on difficult land that had been reclaimed and built up over many years, it also formed a community of all sorts of different cultural backgrounds who managed to get along together because they shared a common interest in gardening and the whole thing was just bulldozed aside for a future theoretical idea of building up a community exactly like the one you had. It grew up of its own steam not imposed by somebody from above deciding what the community should be. The bottom of it is all commercial, and therefore social engineering backed by commercial and political imperatives which actually destroyed, to me the nature of what a real organic city should be, and it is also a big destruction of the specific differences between the localities which were very strong in the 1970’s. The difference between being in Stratford and Hackney back then was quite considerable, there were different kind of people. By working there you got to know the different communities and people, how each of those areas worked, and this is now destroyed and that is a painful process. I’ve meet people that have been expelled from places where they have known all the pubs, the workplaces and areas to move around and they can’t do it anymore. It’s been like an exclusion, like the agricultural enclosures that happened in the 19th century when suddenly common land disappeared, fences were put up and you could not wander through the areas that you had wandered through all of your life.

SM: It seems like one of the problems with the Olympic regeneration is that it is too grand and trying to achieve too much in a very short period of time.

IS: Yes, but it is also trying to arrive at what is required without really knowing who is going to require it. You cannot have people in Westminster deciding that this piece of ground in East London will require x, y and z, and then commission architects and planners to decide how that is going to work because it’s the opposite of what is an useful reality. 

SM: In The Guardian article ‘London Fields’ you were walking the perimeter of the Olympic Park in the Lea Valley with Robert Macfarlane and at some point you described the area as “the Zone”. Interestingly in Tarkovsky’s Stalker the zone is both depicted as a rural and empty area with ruined buildings but there is also ‘the Room’ where ones deepest and innermost wished can be granted to anyone who steps inside. In my eyes this could be read as a metaphor for the Olympic Zone and Westfield, and for many ‘the Zone’ could be viewed as a nightmare whereas for others ‘the Room’ is equally as terrifying.

IS: My way of reading what is going on, walking from the Olympic Park up the high street to Stratford, all of the official versions were telling you, narrating the story of what you were seeing in that area. I wondered what happened what happened if you went away from the official story and turned right into the other side of it. Going into the other side of it suddenly revealed this amazing area that looked exactly like Tarkovsky’s ‘Zone’. It wasn’t part of the story so it was left to its devices and what happened was there was a big creek where the sewage is coming out and millions of old shopping trolleys were being dumbed in there and they are all now covered in mud and have become organic form and it looked just amazing, like animals. Behind it there was all kinds of industrial wasteland and enormous razor wire fences surrounding the [Joseph] Bazalgette sewage pumping station. You got this fantastically strange and surreal zone just a couple of hundred yards away from all this gleaming new architect designed stuff at the other side of the road.

The Lower Lea Valley was quite important in the second industrial revolution, and the ruins of all that were still there, and to some extent are still there. But now they are also joined by these future ruins of things that have been built without any purpose. At least the industrial buildings emerged with a direct purpose, they were making things that were using the landscape to do that, they were using the fact that you can get down onto the Thames and bring stuff in on boats and all that was working to some purpose. Now you are creating something much more like a set for a movie, which you think that you can predict.

Westfield is another set, but more of a set of a street whereas earlier malls were an enclosed zone. Now they have gone a stage beyond in the architecture and created the illusion of an open street so that you have sky above you to make you feel a little bit better. You’re not really in a street, it’s an entirely artificial construct and with very high security. It only exists because it’s right next to the station which loads of public money is poured into which brings people to come and shop in your mall (Westfield) rather than in the high streets which die off and become dead zones.

SM: Westfield has undoubtedly changed the area and has brought a lot of people to come and visit, but how does this effect Stratford as a borough?

IS: Very badly I think. Essentially, if people are visiting Westfield they are not visiting Stratford. The earlier period when I was working there, one of the reasons people who didn’t live in Stratford came there was because there was the Theatre Royal, one of the best theatres in London putting on more left wing or interesting productions. People would travel to Stratford just for this, but then people also travelled to Stratford because it had a street market and shops that were busy. It was a centre, but more of a centre as a town. Similarly to a country town where people would come in from smaller settlements further east. They didn’t just go to one thing, they might have gone to a number of shops, pubs or cinemas. It was a social entity as a town with everything that goes with that. Gradually that is removed into being just this one big entity which is controllable. When you are in there you would have to obey this particular place, it’s not like wandering up and down the high street and going off at random, they can control where you go and you are watched all the time. 

SM: There is a quote in Ghost Milk from Westfield (Shepherd’s Bush) where there was a sign saying: ‘Botique restaurants, eat anywhere in the world without leaving Westfield.’

IS: There is this idea, like an airport, that you can travel anywhere you want in the world without leaving this street. All the Mexican, French and Italian restaurants right next to each other in this one strip of a shopping mall. This meant that all the small restaurants that existed in town before were loosing there custom. I know for a fact that people who worked in BBC across the road, started to come to Westfield to eat for convenience rather than going to the neighbourhood restaurants which they had gone to before. Now you have got this franchise instead where the food really isn’t as good but it’s just more convenient.

SM: What effect do you think that the regeneration of East London will have after the Olympics are finished, socially and community-wise?

IS: It’s difficult to say because you would just be guessing. What you can see already is that it had a profound effect on demographic. There has been a huge tribe of incomers that have come who are much richer and have changed the culture of certain parts. There is a lot of housing, but it’s mostly generic flats that are being sold at very high prices and has no connections to the nature of what the place used to be. It was either a working area, a place that people came in to because it was relatively cheap or where immigrants from every possible kind of community came. It was a very mixed area and that is kind of changing already into an area that is much more moneyed and related to the city and Docklands. It has become a staging post between the two and most of the new development seems to promote that.

SM: There is a negative aura around the whole Olympics and it has met a lot of criticism.

IS: In the current economic situation, I don’t see how it can work. It seems like a grotesque mistake from first to last, pouring money vast amounts of money onto the opening ceremony and all kinds of amorphous things, only generating enormous wealth for some of the big time promoters. The positive aspects are paradoxically also the negative aspects, because a lot of people have reacted to what is happening, and this has reforged a sense of community and people having to seriously think about where they are and what they want and how much they will have to support their interest as a locality. You have had a large questioning of this mega project that has been imposed on them and if this should happen again I think there is more chance that they would respond to it early on. I don’t see any positives directly emerging from it at all, it has just been loss all the way along. You have lost dozens of local facilities, sport centres etc, to go into the big stadiums which even if it works will not be of much use to the people living in the neighbourhood.

In China for example, the scale and wealth of the country is so immense that you can afford to do one of these projects as a PR-exercise and Brazil, where it is going onto, is an emerging economic power who wants to re brand itself and this is a tool for doing that. But for Greece it was a total disaster, they were economically unstable anyway and were doing the Olympics as a smokescreen for what was happening, it pushed them over the top to mega debt and was definitely one of the elements to create the present crisis which is threatening to bring down the whole Euro’s finances. People are ambiguous about Barcelona, some think it did help to regenerate the city and I heard others say that it destroyed quarters that had a cultural identity over a long period of time and were being destroyed by it.

Getting involved with the Olympics and that people are prepared to pour money into that while at the same time saying that the country is at the stage of economic collapse, jobs are going to be lost, factories are shutting down, hospitals need to close down etc; it’s insanity.

SM: How would you go about regenerating East London, a more careful and sensitive mindset?

IS: Again by locality, and by looking at each particular zone, what the problems are and what is required. You need to work much quieter, subtler and responsive to the actual situations rather than creating one grand, epic sweep that demands all of this in one go. There were little bits and pieces that were happening already that could have been supported that were making things better bit by bit. Instead of this we have had this absolute blanket that has destroyed it for 50 years, you can’t get around that.

You have got the Manor Garden allotments community for example, a very successful community of people who are self regulating, and if they had a bit more support they could have been more of these kind of areas. Areas that you set aside and are let to evolve by their own need. Work with the people already there instead of attacking them.

You would have to take the ideas and by talking to people who are deeply embedded and had a distinct relation in what was there already and help them to promote the vision which they have. You should not deliver a structure on them, it’s the opposite process that I think would be valuable. For example there is an amazing house that American poet Gary Snyder, who lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains, created which he and a lot of other people were going to live. Going there and knowing the landscape very well and getting people to join in they built this house from the wood that was around there and made something that was slightly Japanese and cabin like and also a whole series of other buildings around. A lot of the people working with him were architecture students who then later on became fully qualified architects, and were doing something that they were involved in, one in making and secondly they were responding to a community that was setting itself up by its own choice in a particular place rather than accepting a commission imagining a future community. You can’t imagine a future community, you need to work with the community that is already there and get them to express what they need and work with that. If you evolve a city in that sense, organically, it is a very different process. 

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Iain Sinclair was interviewed by Samuel Michaelsson in his house on Thursday 29th December 2011.

All photos are taken by London born photographer Robin Hayes. See more of his work on his website.