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. 

***

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.

London - Gothenburg - Manchester - Soundtrack of a City

‘If only I could, If I could bring you to my hood, if I could bring you to my hood’*

On the train on my way to Manchester for a meeting with the ASN (Architecture Student Network) I am separated from my friends due to us boarding the wrong train and losing our reserved seats, resulting in me sitting on my own with no one to talk to for the three hour long journey to the Midlands. I therefore decide to listen to my iPod. Scrolling past John Coltrane and Tyler the Creator I end up listening to Air France, The Tough Alliance and Studio, all of them artists from my hometown: Gothenburg in Sweden. With just the music and the English countryside swooshing by, I am subconsciously teleported back to Gothenburg. The green hills and sheep covered farmland outside the train carriage is transformed into images of my hometown with the sound of seagulls and memories of places I’ve visited while listening to those particular songs.

All this makes me rather homesick, but I can’t help to think about the importance of music in the way that we perceive and remember spaces and places. This phenomenon clearly does not just apply to music; on the contrary the sounds and the noise that you absorb and makes you remember a place is most probably not music per se. Walking through Borough Market and the soundscape you are exposed to will be a lot different to walking around Whitechapel Market. Whether that is because of the acoustic quality Borough Market acquires from being enclosed, or that of a different type of clientele, is debatable.

‘Maybe, maybe I just got to take the days one by one, if I only could change where I came from’ **

If there is a connection between the places that you remember and certain sounds or music, then it would be possible to map a cityscape purely based on musical and audial experience. Close your eyes and try to imagine a map of all the places that you can remember by sound/noise and then put them together, print them and sneak them into an A to Z in a tourist shop on Baker Street. A family would then pick it up and think that it must be an actual part of the guidebook, go to the places and relive this highly personal take on London.

***

In  the introduction to Geoff Manaugh’s superb interview with DJ /Rupture in his 2009 BLDGBLOG book, he writes: ‘Where the individual sounds of certain cities come from seems beyond our ability to calculate. Endless maps could be made just to trace each sound to its source - every voice, bird, and car horn. Spaces bleed into one another through sound. But is it the physical city itself we hear - the steel and glass, wood and stone, bricks and aluminium siding -  or something altogether less tangible than that?’ 

I decided to ask Geoff a couple of questions to see he could help me understand the complex nature of the (possible) soundtrack of London.

PAPER: In a city like London, with over 7 million inhabitants, and almost every single culture represented in very condensed areas, is it even possible to talk about coherent sounds of different places? Or maybe that cultural diversity is exactly what makes it possible?

Geoff Manaugh: When people talk about the sound of a certain city, they usually refer not to the literal sounds of the streets but rather to something like Detroit techno, Chicago house or the Manchester music scene—and those are very different from what you hear outside on the sidewalk. It is funny when you get convinced that Chicago is synonymous with house music, and when you walk around the streets you expect to hear that type of music everywhere, as if you were walking through a movie scene. It is definitely possible to talk about parts of cities sounding different than others, but I tend to find that it is less because of cultural differences and more to do with the industrial activities that exists in a certain area. You will hear distant industrial sounds coming from a plant, factory or the highway nearby. It is interesting to see how those sounds get focused, accentuated or, for that matter, drowned out by the way that human beings interact with those neighbourhoods. In a loud industrial environment people make up for it by playing incredibly loud music from their cars, or they might get so annoyed with the retail music coming out of shops that everyone is listening to iPods and no one talks to each other.

On the other hand, the soundsystem phenomenon [talking about Notting Hill Carnival] is an interesting intersection between the architecture of the city itself and an influx of different cultures that use music technology in a specific, very social way. The soundsystem is like an audial Archigram installation that brings distant cultures into the city and lets a neighbourhood hear the resulting music for two or three days a year.

P: You are based in New York, working in San Fransisco and also visiting London on a regular basis, do you think that your audial experience of a place is different from the perception of someone who has been a resident for 20 years or so?

GM: If you live in an area for long enough you tend to tune certain things out so that you no longer hear the sound of the motorway, or the sounds of all the trucks and police sirens in New York City, for example. Conversely, you can tune in to certain things that no one else would pick up unless they’ve been there for 15 years; over time, you can come to notice that the harbour has certain sound, or how noise transmits through the air, or how high air pressure might affect the sounds of ships coming into dock in the New York harbour. But sonic familiarity with the local environment is definitely a factor in any city, for anyone. Aside from the length of exposure, I think there’s also a certain kind of person who listens to cities in a specific way—and I would suggest that it’s a minority of people who pay audio attention to cities on that level. Having said that, it tends to be the other way around that people really notice things. Think of the urban dweller who visits a farm or a small town, and the first thing they notice is that it is so unbelievably quiet at night they can’t sleep. It’s interesting when you go the opposite direction and you start steadily peeling away the layers of urban sound and then people start getting unnerved by how silent it is.

P: Does listening to music, and blocking the surrounding sounds, whilst traversing the city change your interaction with the environment since you are removing soundscapes of the areas you are passing through? Are you, if you will, distancing yourself from the city?

GM: I would definitely say that you are changing your experience of the environment and your awareness of a particular neighbourhood, but whether you are distancing yourself from the city is hard to say. It’s the audio equivalent of reading on the tube, I suppose. Are you distancing yourself from London by reading a novel set in Sydney while riding on the Central Line? I used to really dislike walking around listening to headphones, because it made me paranoid; I always thought that someone had said something that I missed or that a car was about to hit me! But when you have a certain style of music that you listen to on your commute home from work, or while you’re walking to a place you go to a lot, it doesn’t distance yourself from the city so much as create a different kind of memory connection between your music and that particular part of the city. For instance, if you’ve lived in a city for a while and you listen to a certain album, you can then find that, two years later, when you no longer have that job or you live in a different city and you listen to that music again, there can be a very intense feeling of nostalgia for a particular subway ride, street or bus route. The music becomes engrained in your spatial experience.

P: Can a particular music scene distort the view of a city?

GM: When you hear that a DJ is from Cincinnati, Ohio, or from Munich for example, your impression not only of the music, but also of that city, begins to change a little bit. An example of that in the US is when you think of Florida, you tend to think of Miami Bass or Hip Hop—a very urban style of music. But Florida, at least in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, also had a huge death metal scene, the kind of metal you would normally associate with Sweden or Norway. This is interesting because very few people in the world think of death metal when they talk about Florida.

P: There is a very prominent music scene from Gothenburg with a Balearic and maritime sound. It is like the music on its own has created a sound for the city. The same could be said about Manchester, with artists like Happy Mondays, Joy Division etc, and also about Detroit and its Techno scene. Can the music being produced be traced back to the architecture of the city, are they somehow related? And if so, in reverse, does this make London, a city with so many different music styles, as diverse when it comes to its architecture?

GM: In the first part of the question, I would say that, today, it’s probably not the case—but I would add that someone could write a really interesting PhD project or a long historical study exploring the connection between the city of Vienna and the music of Mozart. Did the ornamental detail or the mathematical proportions of the architecture of that time have an effect on Mozart’s music? Similarly, did the music of Mozart, Bach or even Wagner have an effect on the architects of those eras, and thus change the architecture they designed in those cities?

Listening to Jeff Mills or Juan Atkins—basically, 1980-90’s techno—while driving around the motorways of Detroit can feel as if you’re in an abandoned futuristic city with a 22nd century soundtrack, and it can even feel like there is no city in the entire world that requires this music quite like Detroit does. But, having lived in a somewhat rural environment in North Carolina, I can say that certain music works just as well when you’re driving around alone at night through pine forests in the middle of nowhere. It’d be interesting to do an art historical project that researches the types of album covers that are used to illustrate certain styles of music. If you see a giant tower block in East London on the cover of a new dubstep EP, is that implying that there is a connection between the architectural style of the London housing block and the kind of music that you would normally hear there? Or could you also show a North Carolina pine forest and understand that the music is futuristic techno?

P: The cover art of The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material seems to capture the atmosphere of what the music will sound like. It is really interesting to see how the music you are listening to is changing the way you interact with your environments. If you are jogging whilst listening to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and then switch to a minimalist techno track by Carl Craig that will surely change the way you move your body.

GM: An example of that is in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Every time there is a fight, people on Twitter talk about the ‘walk-in music’, the music that the fighters choose when they show up and walk into the arena. It’s funny because some of the heavyweight guys that you would expect to play some kind of super-aggressive doom metal, or at least rock’n’roll, are actually walking in to country music or a Mariachi track because they’re from Mexico or the Southwest. It’s fascinating to hear what music gets them in the mood to fight or to feel energized enough to get into the ring. On a more architectural note, it would be interesting to look at connections between architectural styles and the materials that the buildings are actually made out of, especially in the context of venues for different types of music. For instance, in Berlin in the mid-90’s, when the club Tresor first opened it was in the bunker of a former department store. It would be interesting to explore how bass interacts with a bunker-like environment versus the kinds of sound systems that you might install in larger, more spacious warehouses. Is there a connection between the movement of sound in certain environments, and does that effect what kind of music is popular in a specific venue? Listening to classical music in a bunker two storeys down in Berlin would indeed be a surreal experience.


* Lyrics from My Hood by The Tough Alliance.
** Lyrics from 25 Years And Running by The Tough Alliance.

***

Geoff Manaugh is the creator of BLDGBLOG and the author of the BLDGBLOG Book. He lives in New York and was interview by Samuel Michaëlsson over skype in 2011.

Alzheimer's and architecture

Alzheimer’s and Dementia are fast becoming significant epidemiological features of the late twentieth century.[1] Defined as progressive cognitive dysfunctions, which effect ones ability to recall familiar objects, places and tasks, those suffering are highly sensitive to their built environment. However, this is not readily noticeable when looking at the traditional architectural typologies of the nursing home, which either reverted to the International style or residentialism as architectural guides, both of which place little attention on the resident and focus instead on staff needs, function and sterility. With the addition of recent new centers for Alzheimer’s this is changing. The Alzheimer’s centre in Dublin by Niall McLaughlin, 2009, exhibits a shifting perception in Alzheimer’s and in nursing home architecture, focusing on promoting personhood and community alongside just medical care. Not only has this new center been given attention in the popular media but Alzheimer’s is also attracting some big names in architecture. Even Frank Gehry is currently designing an Alzheimer’s home in Las Vegas. This shift marks an interesting change in our attitudes to space for the infirmed elderly and how best to improve it. 

It has been strongly argued for years that the traditional models for the contemporary nursing home are not actually successful and that our social views of age as an institution are becoming outdated. The aging population is changing and with it so must the way we think about the architecture for them. The elderly are living longer, with 1 in 6 people in the United Kingdom living to 100 years of age.[2] This is both challenging our own expectations and obligations as well as threatening the social models we’ve grown accustomed to. Those entering retirement age have been termed the 3rd generation, as they are still mentally and physically healthy and taking advantage of it. However, simultaneously the number of elderly suffering from Alzheimer’s and Dementia is also increasing. In the UK alone, most estimates suggest that the total number of people effected is between ½-1 million.[3] However, little has been done architecturally to support those affected. As Arjen Oosterman points out in his article Fight and Accept, ‘the nursing home is the current default institution, but this hospital like end station is the horror scenario for everyone that still has their wits.’[4] With the baby-boomers hitting ‘old foggie’ territory, this perception of the nursing home will be forced to change. The post-war generation have a stronger sense of their rights and individual entitlements and have grown up questioning the state.[5] The approach to care will have to shift away from medical and towards human solutions and with this so will the architecture, where specialist care can be provided but not at the expense of a sense of individuality, community and sensual stimulation.

Alzheimer's Respite Centre, Dublin, by Niall McLaughlin Architects

The Alzheimer’s Centre by Niall McLaughlin exhibits this new approach. However, this was achieved differently from many of the traditional nursing homes in the UK and the Western World. First, it was privately funded as a bespoke project for the Alzheimer’s Society of Ireland. They are a voluntary organization and had been gifted a piece of land which they were able to get match funding for from the National Health Board. 


This meant that they had the luxury of not being profit driven and were able to avoid much of the bureaucratic red tape that can bog down public medical building projects. It also meant that a practice like Niall McLaughlin, who had no previous experience in medical architecture, were able to win the project. With this a very different scene was set, with a client whose incentive was not driven by profit and who had a clear interest in building an exemplar project and an architect free from any preconceived notions of medical architecture and looking at a subject with completely fresh eyes.

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Jasmine Lebeau is a graduate architecture student at the University of Westminster.


1. Tom Kitwood, Dementia Reconsidered (Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press, 1997) pp. 1 
2. William J R Curtis, “Building for a Longer Lifetime: Niall McLaughlin’s Alzheimer’s Centre”, The Architects Jounral, vol. 233, no. 5 (February 10, 2011) pp. 21
3. Kitwood, pp. 1
4. Arjen Oosterman, “Fight and Accept”, Volume, no. 27 (Summer, 2011) pp. 2
5. Niall McLaughlin, “Why Not Ask the Old People”, RIBA Journal, vol. 118, no.7/8 (July/August, 2011) pp. 46

PAPER open call

Doedemee - 100 Book Covers to Fight Illiteracy, an interview with Tom Haentjens

In a recent article called ‘E-Books Can’t Burn’ on nybooks.com, English author Tim Parks is discussing the emergence of e-books and how they in fact make the reader focus on the written word rather than the material and sensual qualities of the book as an object. Parks poses the question if these ‘...old habits might actually be distracting us from the written word itself?’ and continues by asking himself what it is that people are so afraid of losing if the paper novel would disappear. ‘Surely not the cover, so often a repository of misleading images and tediously fulsome endorsements.’

We would strongly disagree with this statement and propose that the graphic and visual qualities of a certain book cover or poster are in fact very powerful and could be the sole reason for a person to pick up a book and become a potential reader. Having said this, Tim Parks is most probably referring to the poorly designed covers (too many of them) decorating everything from dusty old books found in second hand bookstores to newly published novels.

In a competition launched to fight illiteracy Belgian design firm Beshart announced an international call for artists and designers to re-interpret the covers from the list ‘The Greatest Novels of All Time’ put together by journalists at the Observer in 2003. The lists ranges from classics like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to more unexpected entries such as Philip Pullman’s 1995 novel Northern Lights. We decided to ask Tom Haentjens a couple of questions on the connections between the written and the visual.

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PAPER: First of all, what’s the story behind the Doedemee project?

Tom Haentjens: As a father of two wonderful little girls, it breaks my heart to know that there are kids having to survive day by day. They don’t get proper education, no fair chance in life, just because they were born in the wrong place. Since I’m not the kind of guy who leaves everything behind to start building schools in some remote area, I decided I should try to figure out a way to do what I like doing, and at the same time help those people who do leave it all behind to realize their wonderful dreams. Until last November my ideas never got beyond an embryonic stage or they became so big in my head that I didn’t have the guts to execute them. Then this particular idea came along and for some reason it felt so right, I just had to try to realize it. The enthusiastic and overwhelming response we got forced me to get serious with it. So here we are, 100 posters have been made, the first expos are being confirmed and the word is slowly getting out there via all sorts of social media.

P: For many people book covers can be a very sentimental thing, where the essence of the book is represented in a visual way. I had a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel Less Than Zero that I lost twice and now that I can’t find that same edition anymore I refuse to buy the new ones. Is there a danger in attaching a sentimental value to the book, turning it into a memorabilia rather than appreciating it for what is inside the covers. An example of this might be the Penguin Classics where George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four among other classics are depicted on coffee mugs.

TH: Why should we have to consider the cover to be less part of the ‘work’ than the words. Granted the cover has been designed with as much love and passion as can be found in the words inside the book. A good cover not only portays what lies within, but opens up your mind for the world of intrigues, passion and beauty it embraces. It seduces you. So I don’t see any  harm in getting attached to a well designed cover. Perhaps some people just are more ‘visually’ oriented than others, but I see no reason to favour one over the other. You could make a similar agreement for for album covers (more for vinyl than cd’s perhaps), or any form of design for that matter. 

P: The text of Dave Egger’s novel ‘You Shall Know Our Velocity!’ begins on the book’s cover and continues on the inside front cover. This innovative graphic design confused some booksellers, who returned the book as defective. Do you feel that it is important as a graphic designer to allow and maybe promote this kind of playfulness and a redefining of the norms and rules that we are taught in school and practice?

TH: I’m not a big fan of ‘if you design really bad on purpose, it becomes good design’ just for the sake of it. But no real progress has ever been made by doing the same thing over and over again. So yes, I do believe strongly in experimenting, trying new things, breaking ‘the rules’ and pushing the frontiers. For the place where all the good stuff happens, will not be inside our comfort zone.

P: Do you think that the increased access and exploitation of internet as a source of information and news will have the same effect on the book industry as it has had on the newspaper industry? 

TH: Tough one. I used to say ‘there will always be books’, but as I see how publishing and storytelling is evolving into an interactive experience with all these new devices coming up, I instead have to say ‘I hope there will always be printed books’. Perhaps not so many (which would be good for the trees), and hopefully only the good ones. Needless to say that much of todays printed content might just as well be digitalized. But, better than any other medium, good old books give you the chance to really disconnect from this world and reconnect with the world within the covers, and therefor it might just stand the test of time. We’ll just have to wait and see.

P: If e-books and iPads continue to expand as a medium to replace traditionally printed media, what is the book covers role in this scenario. Can you see the cover art moving into a more digital and possibly interactive dimension?

TH: I think it is rather meaningless to make a digital version of a book if you are not willing to consider taking it to the full potential of the device it is being viewed on. So yes, I believe some digital books will become more and more interactive and visually oriented, going far beyond a good static cover followed by lots of words. While others will probably remain just that, or even lose their cover all the same, leaving them out there all naked and fragile. But just as film hasn’t entirely replaced books, nor will the App revolution.  Most books will keep their cover, some will even still be printed, while others turn into interactive apps. It’s up to all of us to decide what we like best.

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Tom Hantjens is part of Belgian design team Beshart and is one of the initiators of Doedemee. He was interview by PAPER collective in May 2011.

Please visit Doedemee's website below to support the project.

Doedemee - 100 Book Covers to Fight Illiteracy

Below is a link to buy PAPER collective's submission for Kazuo Ishiguro's book 'An Artist of the Floating World'.

PAPER collective poster

See the full collection here

Sketch

Final Poster

Alternative Practice

Does the thought of working in an office 9 to 9 from now until retirement fail to inspire you, like it does me?

There is another way, lots in fact, but one example which shines out R.A.R.A. - the Redundant Architects Recreation Association. This self-defined ‘Studio-Workshop-Brewery’ based in Clapton was set up by two friends interested in discovering other ways of practising architecture. Based in a unit tucked away in an industrial estate, there are desks and a workshop and a kitchen and an outdoor cinema space and even a small mezzanine snug with space for snoozing.

The interesting thing about R.A.R.A is the way that they operate as a practise. Less a company, more a loosely bound collective, the individuals that make up R.A.R.A. come and go as their projects do, contributing what they can and requiring only what they need. Desks are hired out a cheap rate on variable time scales – from one day to months or years. Sometimes individuals are working individually on projects, sometimes together, but knowledge, ideas, resources and support are communal goods are shared at all times.

Sometimes R.A.R.A itself gets a commission. A community group who had taken over an old library in Walthamstow asked R.A.R.A to develop the space on a minimal budget and a short time scale. R.A.R.A. collected a group of willing and capable interns, providing them with somewhere to sleep and food to eat and let them loose on the project. It’s an inspiring model for its symbiosis – interns learn 10 fold what they would learn on a conventional internship and share in an intense and incredible collective experience, and the community gains a well designed project they would be otherwise unable to afford. They are running a series of cinema screenings this month on Tuesdays, which you can find out about on their website. Graduating might not mean office-desk-bound imprisonment after all.

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Georgie Day is a graduate from the University of Wesminster and has previously contributed to the RIBA magazine. 

Fulcrum & Student publications, an interview with Jack Self

PAPER: How did Fulcrum come about? Was it encouraged by members of staff, both in terms of funding and support?

Jack Self: Fulcrum was founded by three AA students: myself, Aram Mooradian and Graham Baldwin. It was the result of quite a drawn out process. I think the initial desire was basically to begin to engage with the students in our school in a way that was perhaps more immediate or more effective than a blog. We had initially thought perhaps to have some sort of newspaper covering school news but we decided what really interested us was to attempt to do something that wasn’t just insular or just about our school but which tried to address some of the topics in architecture that we thought were interesting. We came up with the idea and pitched it to the student forum along with a couple of different people and in all cases it became quite difficult. The student forum for example didn’t want to edit any of the copy. They wanted people to be able to write and to have it printed immediately, to which we said no, it should be curated and it should be edited as well. The aspiration is to do something as professional as we can, although we’re very proud of it being student run, and that was the idea of it. 

As far as members of staff go we’ve had a couple who have taken an interest in the publication but we’ve always felt it was very important not to be too influenced by what members of staff might say. When we were starting out we had a lot of members of staff who gave input but at the end of the day we thought it was important just to follow it up as our own project. 

We’re very fortunate as far as the school goes. We were looking for a way to be the most effective as we could with almost no budget and the way we found for that to happen was the Bedford Press, the print arm of the AA. They own a Japanese Risograph Japanese printer and no one was really using it, it was just sitting there. So we struck up a deal to use it for free and as a result all we really had to pay for was paper. Fulcrum costs between £70-£100 per term, so that’s every 10 issues and we print 500 copies of each issue a week which is 5000 sheets of paper per term. Then we are also very fortunate that we asked the webmaster if he’d create a sub domain for us and he carved off a little bit of space. Before I went to the AA I used to do quite a lot of web design so was able to ask friends who used to work in newspapers or in other publications to edit our text then by talking to people who had a lot of graphic design experience and by bringing together a bunch of people with a lot of different skills it sort of culminated in Fulcrum.

P: How important is it to write about architecture as a student, and why is it so difficult to get students to contribute with material? 

JS: One of the things we really wanted to do was to create a platform for discussion amongst students in the school and all we could afford was one page, we couldn’t afford a newspaper and we couldn’t get people to write more than a page anyway, especially in the first 10 issues. It was really a struggle to get students to write for us, which was really surprising.

One of our aims from the start  was to play on the reputation of the AA to get a really well known architect and place them next to someone who has never written before because by doing that you raise the profile of the person who has never written before and there is a democracy behind the idea of the two articles next to each other. This is one of our primary goals and weirdly the problem has not been getting architects to write but students. I’m often surprised when we email Norman Foster and he replies but I email people in my class and I get nothing. It’s a strange dynamic in that sense but we’ve had a lot of difficulty as far as the importance of student writing. Architecture is not just about buildings it’s a more complex profession and a good part of it is to critically reflect on the ideas and the arguments behind the way we make buildings and I think it’s very important when you are a student to explore written arguments in a way you can’t when you are in practice or working and so it’s quite a rare opportunity as part of your education and as part of your development and self expression to write when you are a student. This is also one of the reasons to why we started Fulcrum, to provide students with a platform. I think the sad thing is that it seems to be the same percentage within any university, and the more universities I go to the more I’m convinced of this, which is that about 10% of any year group or any university are really engaged with what it is they are doing and the rest arrive, check in, do their degree and check out. A lot of people I see that are like this are quite shocked when they graduate and they are not sure where to go next. Education is not really about getting a degree it’s about improving your mind, forming connections with other people and exploring a topic you are interested in. Part of that needs to be self initiated activities. I think being involved in a publication doesn’t have to be the written word it could be images it could be your own personal way of engaging with a subject beyond what is required by a course. I think this is fundamental to your education. 

P: We are constantly told that architecture is primarily a visual language and have noticed that many students seem to fell that writing is less important due to this. Would you agree that writing is just as important as drawing?

JS: I think you’re right. I think that writing is particularly important, as it’s almost a type of architecture, a way of thinking about architecture is to write. I can’t draw, if I could draw I probably wouldn’t write. It’s not about the way in which you express yourself its just the idea that you are not simply thinking about architecture while you are at school, you are thinking about it in a broader sense of how it is you might contribute to the domain in general and how it is you might develop your own thinking about it. What is really nice is when you work quite hard to setup something like a publication that people can write for and people are writing to us saying we have an idea for a topic or even just more generally writing in saying how can I help. One of the problems even in an architecture course, which is already 5 years or more, is that publications tend to come and go so quickly that it’s very difficult to get enough critical mass to really push something.

Fulcrum is a weekly architectural publication printed on Bedford Press at the Architectural Association. It was founded in January 2011 by Graham Baldwin, Aram Mooradian & Jack Self.

P: It takes a lot of time and effort, within an architecture course there is a lot of hard work already. Making sure you can balance that is crucial.

JS: It is surprising how dry the approach of many tutors can be. Maybe it is a question of imagination. It is strange to say this about people in architecture who should have the finest imaginations, yet it’s surprising how people can’t imagine something until you show it to them. It’s something I’ve had before in offices when dealing with clients. You describe something to someone and show them a 3d image, a representation of how it might look and only once it’s built they understand completely. If you can only imagine things that are real this is going to be a very difficult type of profession and it’s surprising when you say to someone we want to do a publication that the student body really can’t even properly grasp what it is you’re trying to say until you’ve started printing it and started putting it in their hands. Then suddenly that transforms. The first 20 issues of Fulcrum were a real uphill struggle, people wouldn’t submit on time, no one was really interested in it and we had enormous difficulties with our print deadlines. Eventually little by little you get systems in place and it was really only after 30 issues that it began to become a bit easier for us, but even so there are portions of a month, 4 issues at a time, that are just a nightmare. I’m going through a period now where I have no idea what will be printed next week because none of the people who I had asked to write had written what they said they would. You’re in this constant deadline and rush to print and that’s after people are able to look on your website and see 50 issues, so when you’re starting out it’s very difficult. 

P: It’s rather impressive that each issue of Fulcrum has it’s own theme.

JS: Often though, especially in the early issues we would over commission too many articles so we would ask three of four people to write for one issue and we wouldn’t know what the topic was about but once we got the articles together we would group them in such a way that we could give it some sort of name. I think in a way it’s quite nice to see other students who are doing other work because it shows you what the possibilities might be and we looked at quite a few different publications throughout time. There was a really amazing publication at the AA in the 1970s called the Ghost Dance Times. Part of the story of how Fulcrum is founded is that I showed this to the student forum as a reference and they picked it up and started re-printing it exactly. They had this terrible problem where the quality of the copy wasn’t as high and they also wanted to imitate the fact it was done on a newsprint, which was super expensive and it ran for about 3 issues and stopped. However in the 1970s the newsprint was the cheapest way of printing it and the guy who was running it, Martin Paulie, was just an amazing writer and every single issue was incredibly witty. He does parodies of Charles Jencks and it’s very well done. When you see something of that high quality and you think that’s done by a third year student it really inspires you to try and do something as well and there’s a lot of other people in the UK whose modes of practice have been inspirational to us. 

I once worked with a guy called Dele Adeyemo who now runs a firm called Pidgin Perfect in Glasgow, which in the post 2008 architectural landscape is pretty bleak. He’s been very creative in the way he approaches architecture and he’s extended it beyond the idea of the desire to build buildings. He’s increasingly working with societies, communities and maybe the solution to their problems is not a building, maybe it’s something which is an intervention in space but which may not be permanent or constructed. That way of thinking about architecture is very important for us as well. To say that architecture doesn’t necessarily have to be a publication where every article is about a building. We can take topics that may not even seem wholly related to architecture and use them as a way to think about the types of buildings we’re designing in studio. That was definitely one of our ideas but at the end of the day it requires so much energy and so much time to create student publications that it’s a very difficult activity.

P: You mentioned that the goal is to publish 100 issues and that there is an aim to create a permanent interest in student publications rather than Fulcrum being a permanent feature of the school. Is this still one of your objectives?

JS: Yes that’s still the idea. Who knows if we’ll get to 100. I don’t know if the AA is going to keep funding Fulcrum and we negotiate it on a 10 issue basis. We had permission to go up to 50 issues and hopefully in the new academic year we’ll be able to keep going, but who knows. The idea is that at the end of the 100 issues I’ll be at the end of my fifth year and I don’t think that when you start something like this it should go beyond the length of time the founders are at the university. I think it’s very difficult and at the end of the day we’re students not professional journalists. The way in which we would start a publication is very much to have an effect on our peers but then I think every publication is different and the intention behind each one is different. I was talking to Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG a few weeks ago for Fulcrum and what we were talking about is the fact that there seems to be a lack of new independent blogs. We were discussing why that might be and at least for me I think his point about the corporate expansion of blogs is very true. In my case, because I also used to run a blog, and for me the most successful blogs are the ones that have a very tight focus. They set out to talk about something such as 19th century hospitals that were made out of brick and then it’s only that stream of thought. By the same idea Fulcrum is definitely designed to be very focused. If you set yourself 100 issues then you put pressure on yourself by saying: well every issue has got to count, we’re not just going to print anything, we’re really going to try and make something good out of it and I think that focus is very important. I also think that Fulcrum, at least for me, is and extension of blogs and for me it was a way to take the idea of a blog, which is to basically communicate with a very distinct circle of people who you want to engage with and have responses from, and take that out of the internet and put it into the physical world which is increasingly difficult but also increasingly easy. I think in a way it’s easier to have a student publication today and have it printed, than what it was say 20 or 30 years ago and certainly we explored a lot of different options before hand. Before Fulcrum started I ran another very small publication called Entropic Landscapes that ran for 7 issues and that was basically done without any computers. It was written on a typewriter and then photocopied on a Xerox and you could produce 100 or 200 copies of which consisted of 8 pages. You could do that for around 4p a copy by creatively using the fact that the photocopier was subsidized. I do think there’s a possibility today to make physical things that have more of an impact and easier today than it was in the past, as long as you have a real reason for making something physical and in our case it was simply the immediacy. It was the idea that you could put it in front of someone, at the entry of the school, in the studio and that people could pick it up and it wasn’t a precious object. 

P: How important is it that the publication is a weekly free newsletter rather than a bimonthly, more elaborate magazine that costs £5?

JS: The fact that the magazine was free was very important to us because it’s hard enough to get people to read anything, especially if you have to pay for it. The whole mechanism for charging someone for a student newspaper was very difficult so we had a couple of factors that came together. The first was by constantly trying to work out how to do it as cheap as we could we were able to give it away for free, which was important to us. The other thing was that we couldn’t really afford to do more than one sheet a week. There are 900 students at the AA and we picked 500 as a fairly arbitrary number, we had no idea how popular it would be and if people would pick it up. We didn’t keep any back issues from the first 10 and most of them ended up going but now we try to keep 50 issues a week back from that 500 so we can give them away later to authors or to other people. Depending on the week we might have a few more but mostly they all go and I don’t think that would be the case if you had to pay for it. 

Part of our format of the two columns with the line down the centre was that on any one subject always present two points of view. Architecture publications in general tend to put forward their view as being absolute. Architects have very strong opinions and if someone has a very strong opinion and is quite well known it can be somewhat intimidating to write an article next to it. So by putting them on an equal level was the idea that within every subject we come to it evenly and that there’s always multiple points of view. That kind of format is determined by what we could afford which was a single piece of paper and although we did experiment earlier on with having articles on the back we eventually settled with the idea of only one sheet. We would have two articles on the front and a full image on the back, the idea of the image was that we thought we would get students to design the image and perhaps people who didn’t want to write but still wanted to be involved could think about doing a drawing for the back. Unfortunately just as we had a hard time getting people to write articles for the front we had and even harder time getting people to do drawings for the back so we mostly ended up designing them ourselves. Although we did have one issue where we had two New Zealand graphic designers writing to us out of the blue, and we were very fortunate that they did an image for the back of it. Generally the motivation is definitely to do something for free. I think that’s the only way you can really hope to communicate with people.

Life After Fifty. Jack Self and Graham Baldwin lecturing at the University of Westminster 

together with PAPER collective.

P: Fulcrum is discussing a lot of different themes with contributions ranging from various students to renowned architects such as Norman Foster. Is the publication seen in the AA as a platform to students to voice their opinions, and what has been the response so far?

JS: It’s difficult to tell how much of an impact Fulcrum has had on the AA. What’s really strange is that we have many more readers online. We have, depending on the week, anywhere between 2000 and 5000 readers online each week and only print 450 copies at the AA. So we get much better feedback and end up having much more interesting conversations with people who aren’t from the AA, and that has also been interesting. One of my greatest wishes is that more students would write to us and say we want to write something for it because that’s really the aspiration, to print student work right next to really famous people. This term we’ve had two issues where we were supposed to print someone well known next to a student, and the person that was well known wrote their article and the student didn’t, so we had to print just the well known person and that was quite disappointing. What we want to do is promote young writers and when young writers can’t get their act together it’s quite disappointing.

P: We have also had interest from professionals and staff but when you don’t have the same amount of students it looks unbalanced.

JS: When the new academic year starts I want to send an email to the whole student body telling them what Fulcrum is. My hope is that after 50 issues people will take it seriously enough to really be involved in it and in the coming term I’m not so interested in having professionals write, I really want to focus on students because I feel like Fulcrum has lost its way a little. This coming week we have an issue by Mario Carpo who is one of my idols and a really brilliant writer. I am very proud that I am in a position where I am able to email him and he would be interested in contributing. The reason for doing it is to talk to people who are in your own age and work out what they think about architecture. I guess you have to constantly walk that line and I think you loose a kind of legitimacy if you’re only concentrating on people who are already in practice or only professionals. 

P: A lot of people in universities are already having these discussions about architecture.

JS: Everyone has an opinion but no one wants to write 500 words. The thing about Fulcrum is that the printer we have works best if you use Japanese paper formats, which because of the small page size means you only have 550 words per article. I thought this was a good length because  it’s like a long blog post or a really short essay, but yes it’s been difficult to get people enthusiastic about it. 

P: It’s nice to see that you kept on going and to publish something on a weekly basis is impressive.

JS: I have no idea why we decided to do it weekly. I think it’s because this publication from the 70’s was weekly and I also think it was because no one else was producing something weekly. We like the immediacy of it, you can have a high turnover and have a lot of different people involved. The academic year at the AA is only 30 weeks long, that way you can put forward 60 writers every year whereas if we were to do it one a month or once a fortnight it would be a lot less. It’s taken up so much of my energy. Basically I focus on studio and on Fulcrum. I think that’s true for the other people that work on Fulcrum as well. All of my other subjects have suffered quite a lot, I guess I’m less concerned about getting a really good mark for my degree if I feel like I got something really valuable out of it. If you put yourself out there and people respond and engage with it, you end up meeting people that you would never had met otherwise. You end up with opportunities and doing things that you would have never imagined before hand. That for me is the real value of the education, more so than getting really good marks.

P: In the end your grades are quickly forgotten and when you get into practice they virtually mean nothing. 

JS: People are very enthusiastic, and what’s really nice about it personally is the fact that it is possible to write to these authors and to engage with them is that I would have no reason to write to someone like Geoff Manaugh unless I wrote Fulcrum and the ability to engage with someone whose work you admire is a privilege. People are very generous with their time and it inspires me to be more generous with my time. We’ve published articles by students who are very enthusiastic, but have never written anything before. They might be very nervous about writing and I try to take a lot of time to work that through with them how to write their article because people have been so kind with their time to us. I think it encourages me to give as much time as possible to other people and it promotes a good working attitude.

P: How has being affiliated with the AA had an effect on Fulcrum?

JS: The reputation of the AA is both a blessing and a curse. The AA is just an architecture school like many other architecture schools and the more schools I go to the more I realise they’re basically all the same. Some invest much more in their PR and in trying to bolster their reputation. Others are more concerned about their academic programs. On one hand it’s been great being at the AA, on the other hand is a very closed world. It starts to believe its own hype sometimes and starts to think it’s elite, which is not helpful for the students because they’re not engaging with anything outside of the AA. That’s not helpful for me as a student because I’m interested in meeting other interesting people and to think you would just do that at your own university is ridiculous. It took us a while to really think about putting Fulcrum online and we didn’t start a website until we were on issue 14 but the idea was quite strong for us. We would scan what we had and put it up online and it was precisely so that I could send it to my friends in Australia. It’s not an elite thing, it’s not a self-contained thing, it’s not just for the AA. It’s so I can have these types of discussions with you, precisely so I can engage with the people who are outside the AA and who are also working on their own projects so we can extend that dialogue outside of one university.

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Jack Self is editing Fulcrum, currently studying at the AA and was interviewed by PAPER collective on Skype on Friday 8th June 2012.

www.fulcrum.aaschool.ac.uk