On "Sambo", "MusicMan" and architecture

Having watched Citizen Architect I would like to comment on the man known only as Music Man. A poverty stricken stereo obsessed man who taught himself to read through comic books and also happens to be the main client of the Rural Studio portrayed in the documentary Citizen architect. Music Man's previous home was a dark and cramped trailer filled to the brim with stereo equipment and other objects collected from who knows where. So one might expect a house designed by a team of architectural students to promote a change or forcibly alter Music Man's clutter filled life. However this is not the case and I must say that I was surpirsed and impressed that Music Man did not change his way of living, that the house designed by Rural studio did not impose any rules on him. I think that makes for great architecture, and conflicts with many a modernist/postmodernist view that the architect decides how people live. Compare and contrast Sambo with the negatively painted Peter Eisenman who thinks that the architect knows people better then they do themselves. How about Jean Nouvel who had it written in contract that residents of his social housing development Nemausus one could not paint or wallpaper over the bare concrete walls, can you imagine how he'd react to Music Man...

I think what's essential in these types of projects is a great understanding of the clients, and a belief that architecture's role is not to enforce change, but to accommodate living. The Rural Studio did an excellent job in addressing this for Music Man, the high ceilings provided a great deal of unoccupied space that allowed for greater air circulation and lighting possibilities that the low hung ceiling of his trailer could not provide. In this manner when Music Man filled his house with his collections there was still ample light and ventilation.

So too in the "The Tsunami Box" where author Gerald Melling identifies the ridiculousness of a modern indoor kitchen for the refugees. He realizes that people will not be able to afford the usage of gas and eventually end up making fires and cooking outside anyways as was done traditionally. Quite comically I believe he is able to sell the outdoor cooking area to the rich American Philantropist by calling it an outside barbeque or something cute like that.

In "Architecture for the Poor" Hasan Fathy argues that slums are in fact the most practical response for the people that occupy them, being that they are built and designed by the people and as such their economic and pragmatic needs are generally taken care of. He argues instead that money should be spent on infrastructure such as clean water sources, waste disposal, before any money is to be spent on housing. And if housing is needed that the people should have easy access(economically) to materials and build for themselves. If any maintenance were needed they would more then likely need to understand how to repair and thus build themselves.

I am not familiar with what was discussed in the meeting, but if we are heading down the humanitarian route we must toss the ego and notions of fame and fortune out the window. We must be willing unlike Peter Eisenman to live with out clients, to understand their behavior and needs and limits. Through that I think we'd best understand how to provide for them and gain the richest educational experience as well. What do you guys think?

For your convenience

Bring me $10 today or Monday if you'd like me to buy you a ticket for the 12.15 screening of Citizen Architect on Tuesday. Alternatively, come with me to buy them, I'm heading to City Gallery at 11am.

Draquila

(Silvio Berlusconi as Draquila)

Feeling a slight case of cabin fever and with a few dollars remaing from my paycheck I decided to escape the house and architectural school with a movie viewing. I decided to check out the Italian vampire movie "Draquila --Italy Trembles" as Italian horror movies are the best. Hoping to see the next "Suspiria" I headed on down to The Paramount.

Imagine my surprise when I realized Draquila is not Italian for Dracula, but instead
"Draquila--Italy Trembles" by director Sabina Guzzanti, is a political documentary following the Berlusconi government's exploitation of an earthquake in the town of Aquila last April and the false promise of housing for the victims.



What the trailer doesn't seem to show is the movie's focus on the rehousing of the victims and it's role in bumping Silvio Berlusconi's approval ratings which in turn allowed him to extend his power into what one victim in the movie called a "shit dictatorship". Quite interesting to think of the architecture and its role in the exploitation of disaster relief.

Disaster exploitation is explored in detail in the book "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein which you can check out here as well as slightly touched on in "The Tsunami Box" by Gerald Melling. As designers I think at some point we may feel the desire to become involved in some sort of disaster relief or some sort of humanitarian effort, and I think this is something we should be aware of.

Unfortunately Draquila is no longer playing at the film festival, but be on the look for it at a video store in the months to come.

Superstudio

Superstudio is quickly approaching! If you haven't heard of it or participated before, it's an annual student competition organised by SANNZ, where you're given a brief brief and brief time period in which to throw together a proposal. It's both a fantastic opportunity to meet students from other schools, year groups and disciplines, as well as be amazed by how much can be achieved in shuch a short period of time.

This year it's being held up in Auckland, and SANNZ is helping us get up there by hopefully subsidising a train trip for those who register. For more information, come to the meeting on Thursday 22nd of July at 1:30pm in room 2.21. If you can't face the prospect of skipping a design lecture I can go and fill everyone in later.

Information I'm aware of so far.....

When: Saturday 7 August
Where: Auckland
Cost: one-way train trip = $TBC, entry fee = $FREE for SANNZ members, but probably $20 - $30 for non members. flight back down = $50 - $60




More updates in the near future!

Inception

Seeing as there has been a bit of chatter about social events, and movie outings, and whatnot, I figured I would put this up and see if anyone was interested.

Inception is a new sci-fi thriller from Christopher Nolan (The Prestige, Memento, The Dark Knight), set within the 'architecture of the mind'. One of the characters is an architectural prodigy, that supposedly designs spaces within a dream state, in other people's heads. Woawh.

From IMDB:

Dom Cobb is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible-inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming.

And here's a trailer:

http://vimeo.com/11837830

There's some pretty spectacular imagery going on here. Collapsing towers, floating hallways, and cities folding in on themselves. Nolan has a pretty good pedigree, and I think that it's something we would all enjoy.

Comes out August 2 at The Embassy. Tuesdays are $10 tickets. You all thinking what i'm thinking?

Critters social calendar

Hi all,

For fear of being swallowed whole by the internet, critters wants to 'go offline' and into pubs, flats, and architecturally relevant spaces near you.  

We intend to continue the movie nights which we had over the holidays, they were very much enjoyed by all who attended. We’ll probably have to change the day and time of the holidays to suit our less liberal post-holiday schedules, most likely to Thursday evenings. How does this suit people?

Also, there are some exciting events on the horizon, so keep your ears to the ground for upcoming film screenings, exhibits, competitions and the like. There seems to be a lot of student activity quietly brewing around the school. Take the initiative and get involved.

And of course, as suggested earlier, a potluck. Maybe even a potluck by the mountain. Those who can’t ski can drink mulled wine and play tense matches of 500 or cranium. If you have a flat with some decent square-meterage relatively close to uni, shout out, as it’d be nice/easy to have a potluck down here too.

The Tea-Room

Japanese author Okakura Kakuzō's "Book of Tea(1906)" discusses the profound influence tea has had on Japanese culture. Chapter four The Tea-Room deals with the architecture and experience of the Tea-Room. To perhaps inspire for the new design project, here is an excerpt...

Thus prepared the guest will silently approach the sanctuary,
and, if a samurai, will leave his sword on the rack beneath
the eaves, the tea-room being preeminently the house
of peace. Then he will bend low and creep into the room
through a small door not more than three feet in height.
This proceeding was incumbent on all guests,—high and
low alike,—and was intended to inculcate humility. The order
of precedence having been mutually agreed upon while
resting in the machiai, the guests one by one will enter
noiselessly and take their seats, first making obeisance to
the picture or flower arrangement on the tokonoma. The
host will not enter the room until all the guests have seated
themselves and quiet reigns with nothing to break the silence
save the note of the boiling water in the iron kettle.
The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in
the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one
may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a
distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping
through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on
some faraway hill.

Even in the daytime the light in the room is subdued, for
the low eaves of the slanting roof admit but few of the sun’s
rays. Everything is sober in tint fromthe ceiling to the floor;
the guests themselves have carefully chosen garments of
unobtrusive colours. The mellowness of age is over all, everything
suggestive of recent acquirement being tabooed
save only the one note of contrast furnished by the bamboo
dipper and the linen napkin, both immaculately white
and new.However faded the tea-room and the tea-equipage
may seem, everything is absolutely clean. Not a particle of
dust will be found in the darkest corner, for if any exists
the host is not a tea-master. One of the first requisites of
a tea-master is the knowledge of how to sweep, clean, and
wash, for there is an art in cleaning and dusting. A piece
of antique metal work must not be attacked with the unscrupulous
zeal of the Dutch housewife. Dripping water
from a flower vase need not be wiped away, for it may be
suggestive of dew and coolness.

-Okakura Kakuzo 38-39

The full text can be found here though chapter four is probably the most relevant to design.

I am also enjoying Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's "In Praise of Shadows(1939)" which intimately explores the atmospere of Japanese architecture and discusses the beauty in shadows.

Dangerous Days

image: interior of the Bradbury building. source.

Last Friday we watched Blade Runner at school. Before I (belatedly) returned the DVD to Aro Video, I thought I'd have a look at the other disc in the box. Thinking it would just be boring outtakes or extra footage, perhaps a narration from the director, I popped the disc in to play and was blown away by the three and a half hour long documentary called Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner.

The documentary, produced 25 years after the release of Blade Runner, followed the evolution of the film from conception to post-production. Providing a profound insight into the writing, art direction, set-making, directing and acting, one begins to fully comprehend the enormous feat that was producing a film-noir-sci-fi on a limited budget and prior to the invention of CGI.

The inspiration for Blade Runner began with Phillip K. Dick's novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', but drew heavily on other artistic sources such as graphic novels and futurist illustrations. It is captivating to view the film emerging from the stunning storyboard illustrations and sketches, the mood and vision of the graphite on paper translating so clearly to screen.

From an architectural perspective, there is plenty to love about Blade Runner. Visually, it is a stunner. All darkness, haze, neon and rain, it oozes intense mood without being overly stylised. The film was shot primarily in two locations - a back lot of the Warner Brother Studios, and in the Bradbury building, an architectural landmark in LA. The art directors also drew directly from FLW's Ennis House.

The back lot of the studio was a generic street-scene, with a smattering of your average buildings designed to look as if they could belong to a street of any North American city. This set has been used countless times in westerns and other film genres,  lacking any interest of its own. The interesting part is how this average back lot was adapted to belong to Scott's vision of Los Angeles in 2019.

Due to financial constraints they couldn't simply build a whole new street scene, so they retrofitted the run-of-the-mill buildings with steaming ducts, clusters of neon signs, vicious parking meters and a melange of  futuristic vehicles. This evolution of existing architecture provides a more believable counterpoint to the idea of a wholly reconstructed urban future.

That dark, pyramidal building with the exterior elevators which houses the Tyrell Corporation, at 700 stories high verges on a megastructure. Deckard's apartment, built inside a studio, cost upwards of $150,000. Its dark, cave-like interior and textile block motif were taken directly from the Ennis House. The Ennis House has a strange, other-worldly monumentality, and also influenced those enormous bottom heavy columns on the interior of Tyrell's office. A well-known piece of architectural trivia is that the columns were installed upside down and Scott would not begin shooting until they were removed and installed correctly.

Dangerous Days would be of interest to anyone curious about creative professions, the battle of wills and balancing talents. Both Ridley Scott and head writer Hampton Fancher had clear visions of how the film ought to be, with Scott assuming the uncompromising my-way-or-the-highway stance depicted by Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. I'm difficult to please with films but wouldn't hesitate to say that Blade Runner is a masterpiece, both as a piece of artwork and subtle social commentary. So I strongly recommend this documentary to anyone who has seen Blade Runner, and if you haven't seen it recently, watch the final cut (2007) and this will hopefully pique your interest enough to sit through the lengthy making-of. 

Revit Up

Here are some tips for getting to grips with Autodesk Revit

Sign up and register to http://students.autodesk.com
You will to need to use your myvuw.ac.nz email address so they confirm you are a student.
Revit 2010 is installed on the school computers, and the school is going to make the installation files available so you don't have to download them, but you will need to register to get a serial number if you want to install it on your home computer. It's only available in a Windows version.

Check out
R:\Course_Material\ARCI\ARCI212\Tutorials\TutorialsArchitectureMetENU_ARCI212.pdf
and
http://students.autodesk.com/?nd=content_box_layout_view_v3&layout_id=75
CLICK on E-Courses and choose Learning Revit Architecture 2010 from the list.

Be aware of a major difference in the look between 2009 and 2010. Look for any tutorials which are specifically 2010 else it will get confusing. The new version is 2011 which is pretty much the same as 2010 but does have slight differences.

the Revit Kid is a popular resource although personally I'm not a fan of his tutorials...

Check out these blogs. They range from the helpful to the irrelevant.

BIM Troublemaker
buildz
ClubRevit
Do U Revit?
Inside the Factory
Revit
Revit Detail
Revit Elemental
revit in plain english
REVIT Rocks !
Revit Zone
The Revit Clinic
The Revit Kid.com!
What Revit Wants

Anyone else got some great resources?

As you may have noticed..

comments are not currently working too smoothly.


Join the facebook page here instead - 


http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Critters/141610409187967


ac

Holiday Reads

So I'm sure all of us vowed that over the holidays we would most definitely read those books that have been sitting beside our beds throughout term, accruing library fines. 


What have you read? Anything decent, any duds?


I've been pretty bad.. only completed one book so far, and it was a light read at that, consumed entirely while sitting in the sunshine by the waterfront on the weekend. The book was a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, written by pulitzer prize winning architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable.


I'd reccomend it if you're looking for a good insight into FLW's life, the man he professed himself to be, the reality, his connection with his buildings and the heartbreak which took place at Taliesin. 


I have also been working through On the Rise, a book by another critic Paul Goldberger. It's a collection of his essays on architecture, regarding postmodernism in New York in particular. It's getting a bit repetitive, and is obviously more relevant to the 70's and 80's than today but interesting to read about the decline of modernism.

On Pegasus

On the drive to Christchurch I drove by the develpment Pegausus and decided to check it out. Quite a grand scale of a design, the town is focused around recreation with it's motto being "Live where you Play".

At the moment very little of the town is built, but I was surprised to see the towns cafe crowded with customers, and the sports fields occupied with childrens rugby teams (which seems to suggest that Pegasus is trying to engage with the surrounding established communities).

The town is situated next to wetlands which are full of birdlife. The town has attempted to engage with this by providing many tracks and bird hides. However one must wonder what the long term ecological effects of situating a town so close to the wetlands will be.





The town center will be built around a massive man made lake that will feature numerous beaches and allow for many water activities. At the moment the lake is built and the landscape around it is complete, but the site remains quite deserted and eery as no construction has begun on the town center.




Yes the town will have a suspension bridge, and even a waterfall.





This is a housing development so of course there was plenty of cheese.


Howdy Partner, why don't we mosey on down to the General Store and buy us a bag of Doritos.

One can also get in touch with their ancient Greek roots.








The buildings at the moment aren't the prettiest, and don't seem to differ much from your run of mill housing development. It will however be interesting to keep an eye on how the grand planning of this development pans out.

The house that students built

Hands up who wants to wants to design and build whilst studying.

Those with your hands up. Are you out of your *** minds!?

Still got them up? How do we make it happen?

Money makes buildings go up so we need a charity, a housing association, a developer or a private individual with some of it and a whole lot of vision. Or government . Plenty of them right on our doorstep and they have some of ‘our’ money they’re always looking to give away.
For example; Housing Innovation Fund - http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/government+extends+community+housing+fund

We’d also need a registered architect to sign it off and a registered builder to supervise construction.

The School obviously has to be on board to offer it as a course/s. They might be pretty keen after dipping their toes in the Solar Decathlon water. They’d need to be getting their fees to cover their costs, lecturer, tutors etc. Design it in trimester one. Document it, submit consent and project manage in trimester two. Build it over the summer.

400 level courses starting in 2012 which gives us 18 months to sort it out.
Even longer for funding if that is secured nearer construction time.

Still got that hand up?

for possible inspiration see
Housing Innovation Fund
Wellington Housing Trust
Rural Studio
Basic Initiative
Architecture School
Share Architecture

Citizen Architect

While we're on the topic of movies, the Wellington Film Festival is just around the corner and we are in for such a treat with the documentary film Citizen Architect. If you've been keeping up with the comments on previous blogs, you might have heard mention of something called Rural Studio and a man by the name of Samuel Mockbee.
 

Rural Studio is a design/build programme at Auburn University which was driven by the late Mockbee. The programme came about as a way to both improve living standards of those in rural Alabama while giving the students practical knowledge and skills to give back to their communities. After his death the programme continues but with a focus on building community projects rather than individual houses. The film contains previously unseen interview footage with Mockbee, as well as student perspectives and praise and criticism from other architects and designers. This movie is bound to feed the little idealists inside us all, but it also questions architecture's role in a broader sense. 

Watch the fantastic trailer and read more about the movie here.

Or go directly to the Rural Studio website to read more about their inspiring programme.

Screening times and venues are:

Sat 24 Jul | 5:30pm | Film Archive 

Tue 27 Jul | 12:15pm | City Gallery Cinema

Tue 27 Jul | 1:30pm | City Gallery Cinema 

"If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession's responsibilities." Samuel Mockbee