Beijing Bye Bye
Building Number 10, Hu Jia Lou Public Housing Project West
Man and van der Laan.
The work of architect Dom Hans van der Laan (1904-1991) is more influential as a system than as a design. The Dutch Benedictine monk is acclaimed by those who embrace modernism as a style rather than as an outlook or philosophy. To the brick-ish modernists he is one of the truly original thinkers of 20th-century architecture. To those who believe in a democratic approach to architecture which embraces the technology of the day he is a throwback. Van der Laan sought a formal language for his architecture which could easily be compared to the catechism.
The Abbey at Vaals by Hans van der Hejden
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding.”
Jonathan Glancey repeated a few familiar myths about the Berlin Wall when he wrote about it recently. He wrote that ’what remains of it are a few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete for tourists to snap one another by’. Certainly much of the actual Wall itself is gone. The East Side Gallery is indeed spattered with graffiti but then how better to treat the last long stretch of a structure designed to keep people apart? (There is surely a whole dissertation to be done about graffiti on the Wall and how it has influenced the art form across Europe.) I’m not trying to do Glancey down. His piece makes a wider point about walls in cities but the fact is there is more to the Wall today than a ‘ few graffiti-spattered stretches of concrete’.
And what rough beast…
it’s hour come round at last, slouches towards Stratford to be born?
Making Maps
As its name suggests, the Ordnance Survey grew out of a military operation: specifically the attempt to control the Highlands of Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rebellion of 1746. A military engineer called Lieutenant Colonel David Watson was charged with conducting the survey under the command of the Duke of Cumberland. The map, which also features a standardisation of spelling and naming, hangs today in the British Museum in London – a picture of how a subjugating force learns about the terrain it must occupy and then conveys that information.
‘What the hell was Colin doing with a Limehouse minicab driver in Belfast? ‘
A really nice bit of flaneury at Homo Ludens, which identifies exactly what makes the former docks at Wapping in London such a profoundly dispiriting, disorientating experience. Read the rest of this entry »
Architecture and Ai Wei Wei
Transcription of an interview with Ai Wei Wei. He’s doing the answers. Pictures are by me.
What is the method of construction of your latest exhibition?
This is Chinese household furniture that folks have been using for thousands of years. They are the most ordinary objects in southern China. The material is bamboo. If you look closely, the poles and the chairs are one thing.
How does the piece reflect your relationship with Herzog and de Meuron?
We have been doing several projects together and we have a mutual understanding about art and architecture. We often share concepts and ideas. The relationship is part of architecture but its also more important than architecture.
Born To Work
More images from Born to Work by Nick Hedges. What is so astonishing about these pictures is the way they are so vivid even if the world they inhabit is gone for ever. Nick manages to simultaneously capture the human dignity even as they work amidst a dehumanising process. There is sympathy, but no moralising.
I’ve picked out some of the images from the book which feature women. The images together with Huw Beynon’s text highlights a few things that we tend to forget. Women were not greatly served by heavy industry. Beynon points that in 1911 24 per cent of employed women worked in skilled jobs but by 1982 that had halved. In 1911, a higher proportion of women could be found in management than in 1982. Beynon says that the expansion of opportunity for women in the 1970s was highly selective. In a report from 1978, the Equal Opportunities Commission concluded that little progress would be made in sex equality. More information about Nick’s work can be found at Working Life.
16 year old trainee, Lockworks,Willenhall 1976
A True Commonwealth
Jordan Baseman’s excellent art piece which was displayed at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh earlier this year tiptoes cleverly around some of the aesthetic and political issues that surround Britain’s civic modernist heritage.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Town Hall That They Had To Move
The mining town of Kiruna is not a normal place. For a start its 145km north of the Arctic Circle in Sweden and for another the mine that it was built to serve is thriving. It costs about four times more to mine iron ore beneath the Arctic Circle in Sweden that it would in an opencast mine in India or Brazil. However LKAB the mining company have been able to stay ahead of the game by treating the iron ore on site and mixing it with special compounds. The mine benefits from the expertise of the top mining engineers in the world who have been attracted to this town of 18,000. There is a very Swedish logic to the simple beautify of the place. As this article on Strange Harvest makes clear the mine and the town are also close in more negative, potentially destructive ways. Yet what the post doesn’t say is that one of the reasons for keeping Kiruna alive is because it is beautifully planned and constructed.
