Why Park Hill Should Live

Posted on October 4, 2011 by

Reyner Banham liked Park Hill. To the greatest critical champion of New Brutalism, it was ‘the biggest brutalist building ever completed’ an example of all that he had, once at least, held dear. In his book The New Brutalism, written in 1966, five years after the completion of Park Hill, he identified in the various buildings he had collected together, ‘a preoccupation with habitat, the total built envrionment that shelters man and directs his movements’. For him Park Hill was the realization of an ideal, with its ‘four 12-foot wide pedestrian promenades’ that ‘thred through the whole complex’. Continue reading →

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The World’s First Printed Building

Posted on September 23, 2011 by

Although, technically, the d-shape process requires no human intervention, the machine sometimes benefits from a good whack with a hammer

In a small shed on an industrial park near Pisa is a machine that can print buildings. The machine itself looks like a prototype for the automotive industry. Four columns independently support a frame with a single armature on it. Driven by CAD software installed on a dust-covered computer terminal, the armature moves just millimetres above a pile of sand, expressing a magnesium-based solution from hundreds of nozzles on its lower side. It makes four passes. The layer dries and Enrico Dini recalibrates the armature frame. The system deposits the sand and then inorganic binding ink. The exercise is repeated. The millennia-long process of laying down sedimentary rock is accelerated into a day. A building emerges. This machine could be used to construct anything. Dini wants to build a cathedral with it. Or houses on the moon.

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Open Source Design

Posted on August 30, 2011 by


London’s design scene has been dominated by designers working with craft techniques such as knitting. This has led to a kind of fetishisation of the handmade, a strange pre-reccession moment when the market for one-off handmade design bizarrely fed into a belief amongst young designers that they could somehow knit their way to providing to society’s needs. As long as we are a society we will have mass manufacturing. There is however room for some adaptation of this phenomena. In his book The Craftsman, Richard Sennett compared the open source world of Linux favourably with the world of Fordian manufacturing and posited it as an alternative model.

Unbeknownst to Sennett individuals in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands have been copying that very Linux model of development, by planning and building structures and furniture using an agreed set of modules. Open Structures  is perhaps the best but other more established people like Droog are thinking along these lines too. The idea is that with a basic grid of 60cm x 60cm to be built upon and a 4cm x 4cm grid for structural supports or members.  

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Designing Trees: A Short Article Which Isn’t About The London Riots

Posted on August 9, 2011 by

Eames, Charles & Saarinen, Eero, IBM Exhibition Pavilion, New York's World Fair 1962-1964

I’m not one of those people who sees in every news event an architectural solution. Much of the rioting that is taking place in London, and particularly in my home borough Hackney can be put down to a combination of frustration, excuse and opportunity. The idea that it this is somehow a design issue is ridiculous. Someone said to me yesterday that the rioting was a design issue, ‘people who are designed out of policy, classes and decent housing, would clearly be angry.’ You can ignore people, but design them out? I’m not sure that’s possible.

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Standing in front of a bookcase, feeling baffled.

Posted on August 5, 2011 by


It would be fair to say that even amongst the librarians here there is a fair amount of amusement— or bewilderment— about the Norman D Stevens archive .  Stevens is the retired director of university libraries at the University of Connecticut and, the blog The Library History Buff  notes, “arguably the world’s greatest collector of librariana”. Librariana, for those that don’t know, are artifacts and memorabilia produced by libraries. The librarians’ bemusement is not based on why these objects – plates, tiepins, t-shirts – have been collected but why they have been produced in the first place. From the point of view of a British viewer, they are relics of a strange institution, which we are only beginning to understand the vital purpose of as it is gravely threatened. Continue reading →

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Taking Sinclair Personally

Posted on August 4, 2011 by


It is hard not to respond to Ghost Milk on a personal level. It is a book about the Olympic Games – an issue I am fascinated by – and its setting is Hackney – the place where I live. On another level I am thanked in the Acknowledgements at the back of the book. This was, I think, for having commissioned an article from the book’s author, Iain Sinclair, on the opening of the Wembley and the Dome when I was editing Blueprint.

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You’re Worse Than Crystal Palace

Posted on July 28, 2011 by

The industrial arts of the nineteenth century : a series of illustrations of the choicest specimens produced by every nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851 / by M. Digby Wyatt. Edition: London : Day, 1851-53.

The strange British genius for turning media production into a prolonged spectacle, which we have seen during the hackgate scandal, dates back at least to the Great Exhibition of 1851 I would say. Reading through the huge profusion of books produced to coincide with that event one is struck by the advanced way in which the organizers thought of it as a mediated spectacle even before it happened. Routledge’s Guide to the Great Exhibition in 1851 one of these many products explains this in the first paragraph of its introduction: ‘Thousands and thousands throngs from all grades of society will witness it… while it will be presented to still greater numbers by the aid of pictures, by descriptions of in the languages of the principal nations and by each eye witness becoming as it were a lecturer upon what he has seen when he returns to his own country.’

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Souvenirs For Buildings That Don’t Exist

Posted on July 27, 2011 by

There is a moment in Superman III Continue reading →

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Anarchy on Wall Street

Posted on July 21, 2011 by

Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915. Mercury toned platinum print mounted on Japanese paper, 25.6 x 32.3 cm. PH1985:0224. Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. ©Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

On 16 September 1920, a wagonload containing 45 kilos of explosives and 230 kilos of lead weights placed outside the JP Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street in New York was detonated, killing 38 people and injuring many more. The glass in the tall windows was blown inwards killing at least one JP Morgan employee of and injuring others. Interviewed in the New York Times the following day, one of the partners of JP Morgan Bank said: “From what we have learned I am inclined to believe that the explosion was due merely to an accident. There are no reasons that we can find that would lead to a premeditated bombing.”

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Thomas Pynchon’s Guide To The Baedeker

Posted on July 18, 2011 by

Perhaps it is because I am a stranger relying on the guidance of others that I find the CCA’s collection of Baedeker guides so fascinating. Although I am accutely aware of the need for generous, thoughtful guidance to a new city, the Baedeker guides published in their early 20th century hey-day have always had a signficance far beyond their simple slender form and without ever knowing why. Now pouring over their cramped text and fragile fold-out maps in the library, I am beginning to understand their power. Continue reading →

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